Neo-mythologism in music : from Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb [5] 9781576471258, 157647125X

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments
Foreword
I Neo-Mythologism: a Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend
II The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music
III Towards the Universality of Myth
IV In Search of the Lost Union: Word-Myth-Music
V Cosmologies
VI Numerology
VII "Where Time Turns Into Space": The Mythologem of a Circle
VIII Reception and Critique
Appendix 1. An Interview with George Crumb
Appendix 2. The English translation of the texts by García Lorca from George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children
Appendix 3. Text excerpts from Stockhausen's Licht
Selected bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

Neo-Mythologism in Music From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb

To the memory ofIrene Alm

Neo-Mythologism in Music From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb

by Victoria Adamenko

INTERPLAY: MUSIC IN INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUE No. 5 Siglind Bruhn and Magnar Breivik, General Editors

PENDRAGON PRESS HILLSDALE, NY

Other Titles in the Interplay Series No. 1 Masqued Mysteries Unmasked: Early Modern Music Theater and Its Pythagorean Subtext by Kristin Rygg (2000) No. 2 Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting

by Siglind Bruhn (2001) No. 3 Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representations ofReligious

Experience, eleven essays edited by Siglind Bruhn (2001) No. 4 The Musical Order of the World-Kepler, Hesse, Hindemith by

Siglind Bruhn (2005)

Cover design by Stuart Ross, based on Victor Ekimovsky's Up in the Hunting Dogs

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adamenko, Victoria, 1965Neo-mythologism in music : from Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb I by Victoria Adamenko. p. cm. -- (Interplay series ; no. 5) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-57647-125-8 (alk. paper) 1. Music and mythology. 2. Music--Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Hermeneutics. I. Title. ML3849.A383 2006 780.9'04--dc22 2006021752

Copyright 2007 Pendragon Press

Table of Contents viii

Acknowledgments Foreword

IX

I Neo-Mythologism: a Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend 1

Defining the Term: "Neo-Mythologism" as Assertion of Myth's Artistic Validity The Diachronic Perspective Remythification in Literature Early-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Myth in Music Creative Mythology During the Age of Disintegration Late-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Myth in Music The Role of Jungian Psychoanalysis in Neo-Mythologism Forerunners ofNeo-Mythologism Prior to the Twentieth Century \Vagner Scriabin The Synchronic Perspective Mythologems The Operational Modes and Archetypes of (Neo-)Mythic Thought

1 3 4 5 6 8 9 11 13 15 18 20 24

II The Prime Structuring "Molds"of Myth and Music

27

Binary Opposition Hindemith's Oppositive Thinking: Is Mediation Possible on Earth? Schoenberg, the Mediator of Opposites Other Instances of the Binary Opposition at \\Tork The Idea of Symmetry and Mythological Twins The Odd and Even from Stravinsky to Reich Mythic Repetitiveness and Musical Ostinato The Mythologem of the \Vorld Tree as the Model for a Musical Score The Meaning of Ostinato in Minimalism: Steve Reich's

28 29 31 39 45 48 51

The Desert Music

"The Quest for the Invariant": Variability and Combinatoriality v

54 59 64

vi

Contents

77

III Towards the Universality of Myth "Wie ein Naturlaut": Reaching Beyond Culture Crumb's "Evocation of Nature": Drones Imagining the Pre-Cultural: Babbitt's Philomel The Composer as "Archaeologist of Culture" The Mythic "World Body" and the Idea of Global Communication From Universal Nature to Universal Culture Polystylistics in its Mythological Function: Stravinsky's Symphony ofPsalms The Tower of Babel

108

IV In Search of the Lost Union: Word-Myth-Music

113

Assonance and Alliteration Babbling, the Language of Magic Mythic Power of Names in Stockhausen's Licht Musical Monograms: Attributes, Possessions, Spiritualism? Berg's Mythification of Personal Names Musical Names as Precedents for Stravinsky and Crumb Naming God and Self Musically: Denisov's Requiem

117 119 125 127 128 130 132

V Cosmologies

137

Composition as a Total Picture of the Universe Artistic Systemology Cosmogony and Eschatology God as Composer, Composer as God, and Music as Religion Schnittke's First Symphony Cosmogony in Licht Ritualism How Myths are Retold: the Initiation Rite of Modernism The Transformations in Schoenberg's Life A Passage to the Future in Secrecy The Musical Mythification of Technology and Science The Mythification of the Cosmos The Mythification of Industrialization

137 145 152 152 158 163 165 168 171 175 178 179 181

VI Numerology

183

Numbers' Role in Cosmology Return of Number Symbolism

183 185

77 79 82 83 86 88 90

Contents

Numerology in Musical Fabric and in Piece Grouping Eclecticism and the Attachment of Private Meanings From Beliefs to Games with Numbers

vii

187 189 192

VII "Where Time Turns Into Space": The Mythologem of a Circle 201 Circular Notation The Circle in Archaic Myths and Jung's Theory Crumb's Mandalas The Circle in the Poetic Text of Ancient Voices of Children Circularity in the Musical Structure of Ancient Voices of Children "Timelessness of Time" Historical Precedents? The Mandalas of Pauline Oliveros Stockhausen's "Curvilinear Thought" The Centerpiece in an Enigma Ritual Stravinsky's "Wheel" and the Folk Round Dance The Cyclic Time of David Demnitz Inner Time and Space Meet

205 207 209 213 216 218 221 225 230 232 234 236 239

VIII

241

Reception and Critique

Myth as a Figure of Speech in Musicological Discourse Mythological Dimensions of a Style: The Reception of Crumb's Music Perception of a Score: Empirical, a priori, or Syncretistic? Jungian Archetypes in Schnittke' s Memos Schnittke's Mythological Outlook Faust and Godliness The Devil and the Perception of Schnittke's Early Style The Mythologems in Schnittke's First Symphony Postlude

241 243 245 246 249 252 256 259 262

Appendix 1. An interview with George Crumb Appendix 2. The English translation of the texts by Garcia Lorca from George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children Appendix 3. Text excerpts from Stockhausen's Licht Selected bibliography List of Illustrations Index

265 273 275 277 287 291

Acknowledgements I wish to express great appreciation to Alexander Ivashkin, Director of the Schnittke Archive at the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths College, University of London, for sharing the archive's materials with me. I should like in particular to mention Melanie and Simon Morrison, and Larisa Gerver for their enthusiastic and generous help with this book at its initial stage. I am indebted to Richard Taruskin for his insightful suggestion to include Scriabin as a subject of this research. Gratitude is also most deeply expressed to Siglind Bruhn, ·the book editor, for her extensive assistance and considerable patience; Daniel Miller and Kate Norris, the copy-editors; Jeffrey Kurtzman, who proofread the text; and Ron Evans, Amanda Hirsh, and Joseph Orchard, whose involvement with the project helped me a great deal. I am grateful to Kimberlyn Montford and Shannon Mirchandani, who read separate chapters of the manuscript and provided valuable comments. Thanks must go to Michael Coleman and Matthew Fossa for their technical assistance with the music examples, and to Irina Schnittke, George Crumb, and Frarn;:ois-Bemard Mache, for their communication through letters and interviews. Finally, I thank Leonid Yanovskiy, my dear and caring husband, for being the most supportive and encouraging of all.

viii

Foreword A mythological component has always been present in culture, whether archaic or modem. In one way or another, mythology reveals itself in every creative process; it is the first system of thought in the history of culture. The semioticians of the Tartu-Moscow school-Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), Zara Minz (1927-1987), Boris A. Uspenski (b. 1927), Eleazar M. Meletinsky (b. 1918), and others-observed that, although a restoration of mythic thought in its totality is impossible within the framework of modem culture, certain components of that thought continue to inform artistic creativity of the modem age. Meletinsky wrote: "Beginning with the second decade of the twentieth century, re-mythification became an unstoppable process that in the end came to dominate different sectors of European culture." 1 Re-mythification, or "neo-mythologism," a term coined by Meletinsky, has features that are typical of archaic mythologia-its paradigmatic nature, its use of archetypes, and its mediation of opposites. However, modem mythmaking incorporates Jungian metaphorical approaches to the unconsciousness and an ironical estrangement from a common orthodoxy. Neo-mythologism involves the search for an individual language and individual myths. Because of the particular semiotic problems associated with the study of music, the application of myth in modem literary genres has received much fuller discussion than in music. A recent non-musicological study emphasized "the primacy of mythical archetypes even in modem literature, where the field has been cleared of the ancient gods."2 Yet the mythographer Claude Levi-Strauss considered music to be a sign system no less closely related to myth than literature: "Mythology occupies an intermediary position between two diametrically opposed types of sign systems-musical language on the one hand and articulate speech on the other."3 Indeed, the 1The Poetics

ofMyth, trans. Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky (New York: Garland, 1998), 17. This book was originally published in Russian as Poetika mifa (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).

2Norman Austin, Meaning and Being in Myth (University Park, PA, and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 8. 3Introduction

to a Science of Mythology, vol. 1, The Raw and The Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 27.

ix

x

Foreword

primacy of mythical archetypes is palpable in many works of twentiethcentury musical repertoire and parallels that of modem literature. The mythological features of some twentieth-century compositions are commonly mentioned in different sources, from composers' interviews and program notes to scholarly works. 4 However, research on the role of myth in twentieth-century music is not extensive. There has been no study devoted exclusively to the past musical century as a whole and its unique relationships with mythology. Two monographs by musicologists on the relationship between myth and music investigated many individual facets of this subject. The pioneering author Eero Tarasti considered a variety of styles, yet in the twentiethcentury repertoire his main focus was on Stravinsky and Sibelius. 5 Now almost three decades since the publication of his classic study, a large number of other composers have yet to be considered from the point of view of mythological features inherent in their artistic languages and methods. Tarasti drew upon the analytical system of "semeanalysis," developed by Algirdas-Julien Greimas, using the classification of semes typically applied to literary works: the nature-mythical, the hero-mythical, the fabulous, the balladic, the legendary, the sacred, and others. His attachment to the subject matter of music dramas or dramatic symphonic works has been criticized as artificial, 6 although, in my opinion, Tarasti chose a legitimate, if a particular way of considering the mythic in music. This approach can be complemented by other paths of research, which I advocate in the present book. Fran~ois-Bemard Mache devoted an insightful book to the problem of myth and music relations, in which he commented on individual twentiethcentury styles, although his study did not single out the century as a whole. 7 Mache writes from his position as the composer of multiple myth-inspired musical works bearing programmatic titles based on Ancient Greek mythology. His study expresses, first and foremost, his own aesthetic credo as a composer as well as a thinker educated in Greek archeology and art. 4Richard Taruskin, for example, recently acknowledged the great role of myth in Stravinsky's thought, in "Stravinsky and Us," in Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 262-265. 5Eero

Tarasti, Myth and Music. A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky (New York: Mouton, 1979). 6See Raymond Monelle, Review of Myth and Music, by Eero Tarasti, Music Analysis 3

(1984): 210. 7 Musique,

mythe, nature ou !es dauphins d'Arion (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983), 2nd augm. ed., 1991. English translations: Music, Myth and Nature, trans. Susan Delaney (Paris and Philadelphia: Harwood, 1992); Music, Myth, Nature (London: Gordon & Breach, 1993).

Foreword

xi

Most of the other musicological literature on the role of myth in twentieth-century music is not available in English translation. 8 Although it offers some shrewd observations on the nature of mythification in music, the main focus traditionally has been the adaptation of mythic stories and motifs for the libretti of music-dramatic or programmatic works. In my opinion, the field does not have to be limited to the problems of plot adaptations alone. I have found greater support for a broader approach to the problem of myth and music relationship in some philosophical writings of the twentieth century. Susanne Langer (1895-1985) was one of the first philosophers to address the relationship between myth and music. She captured both in one definition, calling music "our myth of the inner life."9 Four decades later, a German philosopher Kurt Hilbner offered an entire philosophy of music connected to myth. 1 From reading both Langer and Hilbner, one concludes that the perspective on the problem of myth and music relationships is much broader than the current empirical and narrow paradigms musicologists have utilized. Without limiting the sphere of the mythic in music exclusively to dramatic and programmatic works, the present book attempts to answer the following questions: How do changes in aesthetics, historical circumstances, and perceptions influence the capacity of music to support and project our mythologizing notions and world views? How does the mythological reveal itself within modernist and postmodernist aesthetics? What are the historical-cultural decoding channels in our present-day possession that allow audiences, performers, critics, and researchers to perceive symbolic meaning in music? In order to deal with these questions, I reexamine the ideas developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, who famously compared myth and music in terms of function, structural characteristics, and derivation from a common source. Levi-Strauss considered the pattern-forming nature of the human mind as a universal feature of foremost importance. The patterns themselves vary from society to society, individual to individual. These are not "pre-ordained and

°

8See, for example, Lev Akopian, "Musyka I mifotvorcestvo v dvadzatom veke." [Music and

mythmaking in the twentieth century]. Sovetskaya Muzyka 10 (1989): 78-82; Clinton, Mark, and Peter Csobiidi, eds. Antike Mythen im Musiktheater des 20.Jahrhunderts: Gesammelte Vortriige des Salzburger Symposions 1989, in Wort und Musik, Salzburger Akademische Beitrage Nr. 7 (Salzburg: Ursula Mueller-Speiser, 1990). 9 Susanne

K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 245. 10see

his Die Wahrheit des Mythos (Munich: Beck, 1985) and Die Musik und das Mythische (Basel: Schwabe, 1996).

xii

Foreword

inflexible structures, but rather molds from which forms are produced that tum up as entities without being obliged to remain identical." 11 To continue this line of thought, I have examined musical manifestations of the basic structural ideas on which mythic thought has traditionally relied, such as opposition, symmetry, variability, and repetition. These structural ideas have always played important roles in the construction of musical forms. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century, these ideas gain a special role as their display is unmediated by the dominating force oflong-established principles of organization, for example, tonality. The void created by the disappearance of tonality was inevitably filled with those prime elementary structuring methods first used in myths. When Levi-Strauss applied his techniques of myth analysis to Ravel's Bolero in his work L'homme nu (1971), he offered a fresh approach to musical phenomena, even those that are considered well-known and understood. While advocating a useful comparative approach, Levi-Strauss addressed neither specific contexts (in which meanings were and are created in works by individual artists) nor identity as ultimate participants of the dialogue between myth and music. This missing part is one of the subjects of this book. Clearly, it is not only on the level of structure, as Levi-Strauss claimed, that modem music assumes, to some extent, the place of myth; this engagement is also present at other levels, such as social and political function, identity and meaning. A number of twentieth-century composers, both European and American, from Alexander Scriabin to George Crumb, endeavor in their work to forge a macrocosmic fusion of history, culture, and society-to manufacture, in short, an idiosyncratic myth about the world. Many of these composers create ritualistic compositions based on archetypal symbols of myths, for example, the mandala. My interpretation of these relies on a variety of methodologies, which complement each other: Levi-Strauss' s structuralism, the semiotics of the Tartu school, the mythography of Joseph Campbell, and more. As a result, this book considers the dialogue of music and mythic, both diachronically, as a trend unfolding in history, and synchronically, as a trans-historical hermeneutic construct. Of course it is only in abstraction that these two "dimensions" are truly separate; I separate them in the structure of the book itself only for the sake of clarity of my argument. The first chapter presents a detailed consideration of methodology. First, from a diachronic perspective, I aim to outline and to characterize 11 Cited

in Pandora Hopkins's translation from her review ofLevi-Strauss's theory: "The Homology of Music and Myth: Views of Levi-Strauss on Musical Structure," Ethnomusicology 21 (1977): 252.

Foreword

xiii

neo-mythological tendencies as a specific trend, illustrated by certain examples, but I do not fully explore the approach to mythology of each individual composer. Because individual composers demonstrate different degrees of involvement with neo-mythologism, inevitably, some composers receive more, and some less, attention in this study. My goal is not to provide a balanced, comprehensive overview of the phenomenon, but rather, to point to its mere presence in the music of the twentieth century. The· exemplary works and ideas, sometimes intentionally outlined in a sketchy format, represent the tendency, but do not exhaust it. Many works not analyzed here may potentially fit under certain categories of the discussion presented in this book. My focus is mostly on those major composers whose works and ideas characteristically reveal various aspects of neo-mythologism. The historical forerunners of the trend before the twentieth century, such as the individual ideas and features of the works of Haydn, Beethoven, and Wagner, are examined in the first chapter. Secondly, from a synchronic perspective, the ideas and works by different composers can be examined in one context, in spite of the manifest differences in their aesthetic positions. The diversity of composers' idioms chosen for consideration here is huge: in the same chapter the reader will find passages devoted to figures as different as Babbitt and Crumb. Myth unifies them not on a surface level, but on the level of common mythic prototypes within musical structures. If we admit that this level exists and can be discerned, then we need to disregard, to a certain extent, these apparent manifestations of different styles and aesthetic credos. This second approach is focused on the mythological layer of the mind and its echoes in musical thought, the echoes that are inevitably mediated by various social and political circumstances, identities, and other diversifying factors. The eight chapters of the book present many different aspects in which neo-mythologism reveals itself in twentieth-century musical thought. They deal with major clusters of issues addressed by modern mythography: the structure of mythic thought (Chapter 2), its tendency for universalization (Chapter 3), and its coordination with other sign systems (Chapter 4). Following general reductive logic, the next three chapters offer a more detailed look at specific types of myths (Chapter 5), their operational means, such as numerology (Chapter 6), and at a specific mythic motive, or mythologem (Chapter 7). Adapted for musicological discourse, this structure manifests itself as follows. Myths unfold through opposition and mediation, variation and repetition; the second chapter is devoted to these structuring capacities of myth and their reflection in twentieth-century music's own forms. The third chapter explores the ways in which the opposition "culture/nature," the

xiv

Foreword

major opposition of mythic thought, reveals itself in composers' ideas. It includes a view of polystylistics as a phenomenon of culture mythologized. In chapter four, I refer to some of the compositions in which the mythological is expressed through the recreation of the "lost union" between word, myth, and music. The new life of cosmological myths in twentieth-century music is discussed in chapter five. A neo-mythological composition tends to present a total picture of the universe. The systems of correspondence between different elements, which are typical tools of structuring within the cosmological myths, serve as organizational tools for many twentieth-century composers, so that one can speak of the artistic systemologies of our time. The second section of chapter five deals with cosmogonic myths (the myths of origin) and eschatological myths (the myths of the end of the world). These two closely related groups within the general class of cosmological , myths also influence composers' thought in the twentieth century. In particular, the notion of "God" as of cosmogonic origin became equated with that of a "composer" in some instances, and music itself was deemed a ''universal religion." 12 Ritualistic aspects of music, which result from such an approach, particularly those in Schoenberg's work, are considered in the next section, "How Myths are Retold: the Secret Initiation Rite of Modernism." Mythification of the industrial world and scientific data plays a role in the new cosmological myths of our era. Composers such as Xenakis, Varese, Crumb, and others use scientific data as a mythologized model so that music subordinates to the laws or hypotheses of mathematics, physics, or astronomy. This recalls the characteristic tendency of the mythic mind to resort to a "sacred formula" or a "magic word" in order to harmonize the world. In chapter six, I enter a special territory-numerology in twentiethcentury musical thought-and present a discussion of its mythic connotations. The mythologem of a circle is a major tool used in cosmological myths for structuring the universe. In some modem scores, the circular arrangement of notation seems to follow the tradition ofreading the circle as one of the central symbols and structures found in mythology and as a proto-scheme for structuring. The seventh chapter is devoted to this matter and contains analyses of selected works along with speculations on the origins of their circular notation. The compositions with circular notation are viewed here from two different positions: from the semantic point of view and in the 12"Universal religion" is also a Symbolist and a Romantic concept, prevalent in the ecumenical religious ideas of early Symbolist composition.

Foreword

xv

phenomenological perspective. Circular notation exemplifies the tendency of twentieth-century music to overcome its specificity as an "unfolding in time" type of art in favor of one "unfolding in space." I apply the notions of the "phenomenology of roundness" and "vertical time" by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) to those processes in modem music by which the flourishing of circular notation becomes possible. In particular, the concept of verticalizing time corresponds to both Crumb's idea of "suspended time" and Stockhausen's "moment-form." The final chapter deals with the reception and critique received by some exemplary compositions, whose characteristics pertain to neo-mythologism. In some cases, I follow the logic of illustrating the points of my concept, beginning with those less important, which deserve only a brief remark, to those more important, even if it results in anachronism. The material is organized using various aspects of neo-mythologism as my signposts. In general this study is conceived neither monographically, devoted to individual composers, nor as evolutionary, although I still point to certain linear "paths" of historically inherited ideas. Rather, my research is centripetal, with myth as its subject and protagonist. Ultimately, this investigation aims to demonstrate how it is much more rewarding to view quintessentially W estem composers in a culturally non-purist and non-exclusive context, rather than insist on incongruity of independent cultural experiences. It has customarily been difficult to overcome the divisions between the mind of a highly sophisticated art-musician and the mind of an aboriginal maker of music, myth, and ritual. Both neomythologism and neo-ritualism of the twentieth century clearly provide foundations for transcending cultural borders.

BLANK PAGE

ONE

Neo-Mythologism: a Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend World outlook always contains mythological features. [ ... ]Myth is a necessary category of the mind and of being in general. Alexei Losev, The Dialectics of Myth

1

Defining the Term: "Neo-Mythologism" as Assertion of Myth's Artistic Validity In a December 9, 1997, interview, the composer George Crumb observed that "music tends to be mythological, at least some of it. Some of my music is mythological just in expression. People tell me that it has that sense sometimes-ancient."2 The mythological aspect of which Crumb spoke clearly relates to what is perceived nowadays as myth in the narrow sense of the word, as opposed to its broader sense, which implies a system of beliefs that is ultimately artificial, untrue, misconceived, based on false ideology, or, in the well-chosen words of Richard Taruskin, "an operational fiction or assumption that unless critically examined runs a high risk of tendentious abuse."3 This latter model, the heritage of the French encyclopedists, is among the most cherished by present-day deconstructionist critics, who seek to deconstruct precisely these kinds of myths. In contrast, recent historiography 1Alexey

Losev, "Dialektika mifa" [The dialectics of myth], in Opyty: Literaturno-filosofskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Sovietskii pisatel ', 1990), 166. 2See

Appendix.

3Richard

Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxix.

1

2

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

advocated myth's conscious integration as a model of intelligent activity,4 not to mention the artistic application of myth. Consider, in this introductory discussion, Crumb and his "mythological expression" an example of such an application. Crumb regarded the mythological as venerated in its archaic symbolic realm. This narrow interpretation of myth may be seen as the mode of artistic creativity that never ceases to exist, in spite of any attempts to demystify myth and thus turn it into "logos." In Plato's writings, mythos is juxtaposed with logos. While logos is associated with analysis, argument, proof, and differentiation (it also is translated as "word"), mythos is based on belief, imagination, recollection, and wholeness. 5 Crumb's definition of myth reveals his connection to the Platonic tradition oflinking myth to poetry. He states: "Myths and those mythical gods continue to live culturally. They represent poetic truths."6 The composer's view of myth loosely matches the first and third categories of Bruce Lincoln's classification of assertions about the validity of myth: 1) strongly positive (e.g., myth is "primordial truth" or "sacred story"); 2) strongly negative (myth is "a lie" or "an obsolete worldview"); or 3) something in between ("poetic fancy"). 7 I suggest that the prefix "neo-" placed before "mythological" might serve as a terminological aid in distinguishing between the newly constructed, resurrected, desirable, vitalthat is, culturally inspiring-myths and those myths in need of de-mythification. The hermeneutic construction (or deconstruction, for critics of the concept) of neo-mythologism begins with the question of the meaning and validity of the term "mythological," but it needs historical context.

4 See

Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 5 See

Aza A. Takho-Godi's study of the word "myth" in Plato-"Mif u Platona kak deistvitel'noe i voobrazhaemoe [Myth in Plato's works as the real and as the imaginary], in Platon i ego epokha [Plato and his era] (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 58-82. On the differentiation between logical thought and myth in Plato see also H. D. Kitto, "Poesis, "Structure and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 187-88. "Logos" has a different meaning-an association with God or Christ-in Christian theological tradition (in particular, as conceptualized by the Russian Symbolists and the Russian Formalists). The resulting less oppositional relationship of that "logos" to myth is discussed in Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 112. This specific connotation of"logos" is not relevant to my discussion. 6 Interview 7 Bruce

at Rutgers University, December 1997 (see Appendix).

Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), ix.

The Diachronic Perspective

3

The Diachronic Perspective The nineteenth-century Romantic acclaim for myth was reshaped in the early twentieth century. 8 Such pillars as Stravinsky and Schoenberg adopted and built on aspects of Wagner's mythologism. Sibelius followed a similar trajectory stemming from Wagner, as Eero Tarasti observed. 9 Crumb started to make connections between himself, Sibelius, and other American composers, in stating that "the music of Sibelius is mythological in [a nonprogrammatic] sense, too. " 10 We unavoidably enter a diachronic paradigm of viewing neo-mythologism as a trend, rather than an artistic movement in the conventional sense, such as symbolism or expressionism. A trend is based not on common aesthetic manifestos that connect diverse composers, but rather on broader tendencies that affect culture as a whole. In the broader view of the twentieth century as a period in which culture itself was mythologized and filtered through different political and religious ideological screens, the musical phenomena related to this process may be viewed as a distinct trend. This broader view also informs the hermeneutics of neo-mythologism. Consider Roland Barthes's 1957 statement: myth today [ ... ] is a type of speech, a mode of signification, a form. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message; there are formal limits to myth, there are no "substantial" ones. Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. 11

Barthes's interpretation of mythification as a universal trend is symptomatic of the entire twentieth century's thirst for mythologizing. As this 1979 encyclopedic overview declared, there exist profound mythological needs in modem society, and some are filled by myths borrowed from submerged or alien traditions. Modem society's neglect of cosmic symbolism [ ... ] 8 See

George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Richard Middleton, "After Wagner: The Place of Myth in Twentieth-century Music," The Music Review 3 (1973): 307-27. 9Eero Tarasti, Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially That of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky (The Hague: Mouton, 1979). 10 See

Appendix.

11 Roland

Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 109. 1st French edition, 1957.

4

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend has provoked certain reactions, such as the continuing interest in astrology. [... ]And the huge scientific advances of the twentieth century have given rise to a literature, science fiction, that resembles myth, even down to an eschatological element. [ ... ] Secularization in modem society [ ... ] is accompanied by a process whereby new myths are formed. 12

Remythification in Literature According to other cultural critics, in the beginning of the twentieth century the prominence of mythic models in composing artistic texts took on a new intensity. Eleazar Meletinsky (b. 1918), the Russian mythographer and literary scholar, wrote about "the rebirth of myth in contemporary literature" 13 and in broader twentieth-century culture in general: In one way or another, the history of culture was seen against the

background of the history of primitive and classical mythology. The relationship between myth and culture considered as a whole has always been changing and evolving, but there has been an overall tendency toward de-mythification. The apogee of this process was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the positivism of the nineteenth. The [twentieth] century has witnessed a return to mythicizing, especially in the culture of the West. This recent phenomenon has gone well beyond the Romantic infatuation with myth and stands diametrically opposed to de-mythification. 14

Although the nature of twentieth-century mythification cannot be understood without looking back to the characteristics of the mythology of early societies and of antiquity, Meletinsky writes, it is important to distinguish between what he calls "authentic" myth and its contemporary artistic reincarnation: The language of twentieth-century mythification does not at all coincide with archaic myth. There is no modem equivalent for the degree of social integration that marks life in primitive societies. [... ] Even the cyclical pattern attributed to the development of events in modern mythification is not universally found in archaic myths. 15 12Kees

W. Bolle and Richard G. Buxton, "Myth and Mythology," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. vol.12 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 721. 13 Eleazar

Meletinsky, The Poetics of Myth, trans. Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky (New York: Garland, 1998), xix. Originally published as Poetika mifa (Moscow: Nauka, 1976). 14Ibid.,

xxi.

15 Ibid.,

339-40.

The Diachronic Perspective

5

Meletinsky pointed to mythification in the works of such diverse authors as Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot, O'Neill, Cocteau, and Marquez. These writers, he explains, view myth either as the instrument by which artistic organization is imposed on their material, or as stable archetypes that are relevant for the cultures of different nations. [... ] Mythification is certainly linked to Modernism, but the ideological and artistic aspirations of mythicising writers have allowed the process to go well beyond the confines of the Modernist movement. Mythification in literature and criticism has replaced nineteenth-century Realism. 16

Moreover, Meletinsky emphasized that the tendency for remythification in the twentieth century is so complex and contradictory as to include those writers who have remained faithful to the traditions of Realism (such as Thomas Mann, for example). Nevertheless, mythification in the sense Meletinsky understands it "cannot be reduced to other, simpler factors such as, for example, being considered the sum of various mythologies." 17 Importantly, the degree of involvement with the mythological in some early-twentieth-century creative approaches cannot be reduced simply to an interest, however intense, in the mythic. It is the mythologizing activity itself-the artistic myth-making, which involves the intuitive attempt to recreate a specific mythic logic-that defines neo-mythologism. For instance, Meletinsky argues that Thomas Mann conceived Doctor Faustus as a myth for our time. Zara Minz suggests that in the beginning of the twentieth century, the representatives of the Russian Symbolist movement, influenced by Nietzsche and Wagner, attempted to create "text-myths."18 Early-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Myth in Music Clearly, the issue of myth in music and art thrived in philosophical and theoretical thinking in Europe and America in the early twentieth century. 19 In 1915, the Russian philosopher Alexei Losev assessed Scriabin-his 161bid. 17 Ibid.,

xxi.

18"0 nekotorykh

'neomifologicheskikh' tekstakh v tvorchestve russkikh simvolistov" [About some "neo-mythological" texts in works by Russian Symbolists], in Tvorchestvo Bloka i rnsskaya kulturaXXveka: [The work of Blok and Russian culture of the twentieth century], Scholarly Proceedings ofTartu University, vol. 459 (Tartu: Tartu University, 1979), 76. 19The

most representative is Ernst Cassirer, with Sprache und Mythos (1925), Die Philosophie der Aujkliirnng (1932), An Essay on Man (1944), and The Myth of the State (1946).

6

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

personality as well as individual works-from the point of view of the mythic features inherent in the creative mind of a musician. 20 In 1925 and 1926, Max Kraussold, one of the contributors to Langer's anthology Reflections on Art, devoted a special study to the subject of myth's relations with music. 21 Yet another instigator of the interdisciplinary approach to myth and music was the pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (18981948). In his essay, "The Incarnation of Myth" (1940), which centered on Wagner's Ring cycle, Eisenstein called for an analysis of mythological thinking in and of itself. 22 He examines the synthesis of the arts as a bridge between archaic mythic thought and the ways in which it can be re-used by later artists, implying his own art as a director: Exploiting our visual effects, music and plot in equal measure, we shall be able to stir the layers in the depth of our consciousness where thought is still powerfully imagistic, poetic, emotional and mythological. 23

Notably, Eisenstein points to "the depth of our consciousness" where, he believes, mythological thought is still preserved. This idea makes him correspondent with Jungian psychoanalysis, which focused on revealing mythic archetypes in the deep levels of the psyche. Eisenstein also insists that "the synthetic merging of emotion, music, action, light and color [aids] in the process of creating legend and myth."24 Creative Mythology During the Age ofDisintegration Given the many specific causes for a greater thirst for myth in various fields and artistic movements, is it reasonable to search for a general rationale for renewed empathy with the mythological? Joseph Campbell, for one, judged twentieth-century culture as "the peak of an accelerating disintegration that has been undoing the formidable orthodox tradition since 20Losev's essay Mirovozzrenie Skriabina [Scriabin's Weltanschauung] was written soon after Scriabin's death in 1915 but remained unpublished until 1990. It appeared in Strast' k dialektike [Passion for dialectics] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel'). 21 Max

Kraussold, "Music and Myth in Their Mutual Relations," in Reflections on Art, ed. Susanne K. Langer (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1958; reprint: Amo Press, 1979), 340. Kraussold's article was originally published in Die Musik 18 (1925-6): 176-87. 22 Sergei Eisenstein, "Voploshenie mifa," in Sergei Yutkevich et al., eds., Izbrannye proizvedeniya v shesti tomakh [Selected works in six volumes] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964-71): 329-59.

23 Sergei Eisenstein,

"The Incarnation of Myth," in Selected Works, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell, vol. 3 (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 155.

24 Ibid.,

161.

The Diachronic Perspective

7

as far as about the thirteenth century." 25 Owing to this disintegration, a trans-personal "creative mythology" crumbled into individual mythologies. Campbell ascribed the demise of orthodoxy to a condition in which the released creative powers of a great company of towering individuals have broken forth; so that not one, or even two or three, but a galaxy of mythologies-as many, one might say, as the multitude of its geniuses-must be taken into account in any study of the spectacle of our own titanic age. 26

If one looks at mythology solely from a religious perspective, like Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), then one might conclude that artists of the twentieth century turned to mythic structures in response to a religious void-a crisis foretold by Nietzsche's famous dictum "God is dead." The relationship between spiritual and mythic belief calls forth the issue of Kunstreligion, defined by Dahlhaus as "religion--or its truth-having passed from the form of myth into the forms of art. " 27 Meletinsky, though, found it possible to consider the poetics of myth independently from its religious aspect. He focused on the mechanism of substituting a harmful myth, deserving of de-mythification, with a good one. In an example that he drew, Thomas Mann attempted to substitute the Aryan myth promoted by Nazi cultural policy with his humanistic myth based on the Faust tale. Yet, the notions of disintegration and de-sacralization are as crucial in twentieth-century thought as those of re-integration and resacralization. In the 1960s, some artists and philosophers began to interpret the disintegration and crisis of cultural and religious consciousness as a distinguishing feature of twentieth-century culture. Marc Chagall wrote: God, perspective, color, the Bible, form, lines, traditions, the socalled humanisms, love, caring, the family, the school, education, the prophets, and Christ Himself have fallen to pieces. 28

Susanne Langer likewise spoke of disintegration, the substitution of institutional belief by individual beliefs in modem society: 25 Joseph

Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Penguin Books,

1968), 3. 26 Ibid.

27 Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (New York, London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 144. 28 Marc

Chagall, "Why Have We Become So Anxious?" (1964) in Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 87.

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

8

In Christian Europe the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees, to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts[ ... ]. In modern society such exercises are all but lost. Every person finds his Holy of Holies where he may: in Scientific Truth, Evolution, the State, Democracy, Kultur, or some metaphysical word like "the All" or "the Spiritual."29

Late-twentieth-century philosophical writings on the mythological qualities of music voice similar complaints about disintegration. Kurt Hubner observed: "Music is only one facet in the whole picture of disruption in which the modem world is determined. " 30

Late-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Myth in Music In his 1977 radio conversation, later published as a short book, LeviStrauss defended a concept of mythification that roughly parallels Campbell's concept of "creative mythology." Specifically, he suggested that since the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, music gradually "took over the function-the intellectual as well as emotive function-which mythical thought was giving up more or less at the same period."31 Although LeviStrauss' s assessment of mythification of culture is more music-specific than Campbell's general picture, it is not limited exclusively to music, but is shaped along the triangle "music-myth-literary language." Levi-Strauss operates on the level of text structuring when he cites such major works as Rite of Spring (1913) and Bolero (1921) as examples of myth transformed into music. He also addresses the larger picture in which myth, music, and literature transfer their function and structure to each other over the course of history. He argues that when Western art music took over the function of mythology, the first novels began to appear, replacing mythology as a literary genre. Moreover, according to Levi-Strauss more recently (in 1977), another such passing of function and structure arose: We are witnessing the disappearance of the novel itself. And it is quite possible that what took place in the eighteenth century when music took over the structure and function of mythology is now taking place again, in that the so-called serial music has

29 Susanne Langer,

Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism ofReason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 288. 30Hubner, 31 Myth

Die Musik und das Mythische (Basel: Schwabe, 1996), 17.

and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 46.

The Diachronic Perspective

9

taken over the novel as a genre at the moment when it is disappearing from the literary scene.32

Levi-Strauss leaves undeveloped the idea of the reversed roles of serial music and the disappearing novel in this final passage of the book. However, it is significant that he stresses that mythic thought did not vanish from Western culture over the last several centuries-it simply changed its form of expression. If it could ever be proven that a certain type of twentieth-century music replaced the function of the novel, how would that correlate with Meletinsky' s study demonstrating the remythification of the twentieth-century novel? Although Levi-Strauss refers to the 1970s and Meletinsky focuses on the novels up to the late 1960s, the chronological margin between the two periods is too thin to reveal any dramatic changes within the genre of the novel. If myth now resides in the novel, as Meletinsky wants his readers to think, then, following Levi-Strauss's theory, music would likely "take over" the mythic component from this disappearing genre. Like Levi-Strauss, I will leave the issue open. It imparts a sense of circularity through the idea of passing the mythic component of culture from one medium to another. It is important to remember, however, that what Meletinsky understands by myth is merely its poetics; the Moscow-Tartu school clearly stated that archaic mythic thought could not possibly be resurrected in its original and entire form. 33 The Role ofJungian Psychoanalysis in Neo-Mythologism Carl Gustav Jung ( 187 5-1961 ), via mythic symbols, bridged the archaic and the modern, the collective and the individual. Meletinsky emphasizes that neo-mythologism was really based in "neo-psychologism," or Jungian psychoanalysis. The latter with its universalizing and metaphorical interpretation of the unconscious play of the imagination, presented a certain trampoline for a huge leap from the psychology of an alienated or oppressed modem individual to the pre-reflexive psychology of archaic society. 34

321bid.,

54.

33Yuri

Lotman and Vladimir Uspenski, "Mif. lmya. Kul'tura" [Myth. Name. Culture] in Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Studies on sign systems], vol. 6 (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 1973): 282-95. 34Poetika

mifa, 3rd edition (Moscow: Vostochnaja literatura, 2000), 297, my translation.

10

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

Jung associated the unconscious part of the individual psyche with the collective unconscious, which reflects a central feature of mythology: the awakening of cultural memory. In Jungian theory, this awakening occurs in the individual psyche as dreams or artistic creations. Scriabin intended Predvaritel 'nae deistvo (Preliminary Action, 19141915) for his Mysterium as "a collective act"35 and a memory. Each participant must remember what he has experienced from the moment of the creation of the world. It exists in each of us-it is only necessary to call up the experience-it, and the memory. [ ... ]To relive the primal integration is to relive the whole history of the race. 36

Scriabin also proclaimed the importance of the collective memory of mankind in its mythic function of "reliving the primal integration," independent from Jung, although almost synchronously with him. The composer's work paralleled the early stages of Jung's research-in particular, the publication in 1912 of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido [Symbols of Transformation ]-full of mythological images and motifs. 37 The turn to pre-reflective psychology is aimed at achieving wholeness -that is, the healing of the fragmented personality, in Jungian terms. Wholeness can be attained through ritual and its symbolic forms. However, a twentieth-century artist who continues to pursue the traditional goal of myth-a reconstruction of the original wholeness of the world-inevitably does so from the position of an outsider, in a personal effort. This highly individual approach is paradoxically combined in neo-mythologism with the tendency for universality. In particular, mixing elements of different faiths and myths, equating them, using old archetypes and mythologems in new contexts, all are representative features. The aspiration for universality also 35Leonid Leonidovitch Sabaneev, Vospominania o Skriabine [Memoirs of Scriabin] (Moscow: Muzykal'nyi sektor gosudarstvennogo izdatel'stva, 1925), 150. The idea of the Mysterium first came to Scriabin in 1902; the composition was unfinished. Preliminary Action was intended as a preparative composition for the Mysterium, which he never composed; this Preliminary Action Scriabin never completed either, but a considerable body of his sketches and a verbal text survive. For more detail and translation of the text, see Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), ch. 3. 36 Scriabin's

remark is quoted by Sabaneev in Vospominania, 83, trans. Malcolm Brown, in "Skriabin and Russian 'Mystic' Symbolism," Nineteenth-Century Music 3 (1979): 49. 37 Scriabin's

interest in occult and Eastern philosophies paralleled Jung's interests ofroughly the same period. Jung's first published paper, Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phiinomene (On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena), appeared in 1902.

The Diachronic Perspective

11

reveals itself through the creation of a cosmological all-embracing picture of the world in a work of art where history, culture and the present alloy into one grandiose synthesis. A neo-mythological artist believes in the actual power of his work to create this synthesis and thus conceives it as an almighty "magic word," or like an ancient ritual; nevertheless in many cases this ritualistic feature is presented and perceived in an ironic and a playful manner-for example, in Stravinsky, as I will argue later. The ironic voicing of some neo-mythological creations, as Meletinsky puts it, "expresses the enormous distance separating modem man from the creators of primitive myth. "38 Forerunners ofNeo-Mythologism Prior to the Twentieth Century Sergey Averintsev, a Russian scholar of comparative literature and mythology, finds "moments of high-conscious play with previously known archetypes" in Ovid (43 B.C.-17or18 A.D.). Ovid aesthetically flattens different layers of Greek and Roman mythology and allows any degree of frivolity and irony in regard to various motifs. This is permissible because the kind of individual myth making that Ovid uses is free of any life-organizing tasks. 39 Thus, neo-mythology is not really "new," but stands in contrast to the collective mythology of the period in which art embodied rather than expressed mythology. The estrangement of art, often expressed in a playful and ironic form, is inherited by neo-mythologism from the individual mythologies of a literary tradition that can be traced far into the past. However, the special role of myth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in new and unique combinations of mythic-artistic ways of thinking, and it is precisely this pluralistic worldview that makes neomythologism special. Myth no longer appeals only to circumscribed areas of the imagination, nor do neo-mythological "text-myths" (Minz's term) appear as stylizations. Instead, Minz insists, myth "infuses the blood" of European artistic culture itself. 40 Myth does not inherit a solitary realm in artistic expression, nor does it oppose an artist's personal outlook. Myth appears in these texts as one of many coterminous elements. Minz's 38 Meletinsky,

The Poetics of Myth, 277.

39"

'Analiticheskaja psichologia' K.-G. Junga i zakonomemosti tvorcheskoi fantazii" [The "analytic psychology" of C.G. Jung and the principles of creative fantasy] in 0 sovremennoi burzhuaznoi estetike [On modem bourgeois esthetics], vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 113. 40Minz,

"O nekotorykh," 76.

12

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

observation regarding Russian Symbolism may also be applied to Scriabin, as I explain later in this chapter. The orientation toward myth in Romanticism is habitually described as an admixture of folklore and fantastic images. The Romantic approach, influenced by the poetics of myth and fairy tale, features direct citations of mythic stories. According to Minz, the subjectivity of the Romantic author is either dissolved into the mythic world and merged with it, or more often this mythic world illustrates certain features of the author's position. The author's point of view (the expression of Romantic irony) may dominate over the mythic or folklore-oriented outlook. The Romantics turned to mythology to recapture a desired oneness with nature. Romantic pantheism, inaugurated by Rousseau and Schiller, can also be felt in Beethoven's reverence for nature. In what follows, I trace the neo-mythological trend in music from its origins in the nineteenth century, which will reveal its specificity against the general Romantic approaches to mythology. Aside from the obvious chronological and stylistic succession of Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Scriabin, and Stockhausen, these composers also exhibit common features of neomythologism, including syncretism, a propensity for universality and cosmologism, and an individual approach to common orthodoxies. As previously noted, traces of neo-mythologism are evident as far back as Haydn's The Creation (1798), where, famously, the archetypal mythologem of creation is reconstructed through the sounding matter. The pluralistic approach might have taken root in this work, if we trust Lawrence Kramer's claim that Haydn in The Creation combines elements of traditional Christianity with modem cosmological speculation and a scientific model of the cosmos. 41 Even more characteristic of neo-mythologism is what Maynard Solomon describes as Beethoven's "rejecting the primacy of dogmatic, biblical, and hierarchical authority in favor of a universal, humanistic religion," the position considered by Solomon as a "compromise between nature worship, enlightened ideas, and Christianity."42 From Solomon's discussion one concludes that Beethoven replaced one group of myths with another, and that he usurped dominant orthodoxy. The individualistic nature of Beethoven's quest for faith manifests itself in what Solomon calls the composer's identification with a suffering savior, as well as his disregard for organized religion. At the same time, Beethoven seeks an "intimate 41 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 81 and 91. 42 Maynard Solomon, "The Quest for Faith," in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 217 and 220.

The Diachronic Perspective

13

communion with a variety of deities," as he turns to Eastern, Indian, Egyptian, and classical mythology. 43 Pluralism, a key aspect of neomythologism, emerged in the philosophical writings of the pre-Romantic epoch and dominated those of early Romanticism, for which Solomon's study provides some evidence. The author points to the tendency to "expand the concept of divinity to include the totality of its manifestations" and "remove the veils that differentiate diverse forms ofbelief."44 Wagner Wagner's involvement with mythology is much less ambiguous. LeviStrauss, a later analyst of myth, notably saw him as his true predecessor and nothing less than "the initiator of structural analysis ofmyth."45 By enabling music to take over the structures of myth, Wagner was the first, in LeviStrauss' s view, to become conscious of this process, while in general in "all musical forms [... ] music did not really invent but borrowed unconsciously from the structure of the myth.''46 Both Levi-Strauss and Meletinsky point to the leitmotiv, with its characteristic systematic recurrence, as Wagner's major tool for recreating the cyclic and reiterative logic of myth. Certain styles ofliterary prose characterized by neo-mythologism drew on Wagner's combination of myth and music-for example, James Joyce. 47 If we apply to Wagner the criteria that Meletinsky used to define neomythologism in the twentieth-century novel, allowing for the obvious anachronism, the composer exemplifies a characteristic link between neomythologism and Jungian archetypes rooted in myths and, thus, in the collective unconscious. Wagner's expression of "purely human intuitions" is comparable to the archetypes of the Jungian collective unconscious: Lohengrin is no mere outcome of Christian meditation, but one of man's earliest poetic ideals; just as [... ] it is a fundamental error of our modem superficialism, to consider the specific Christian legends as by no means original creations. Not one of the most affecting, not one of the most distinctive Christian myths belongs 43 Ibid.,

2 I 8 and 22 I .

44 Ibid.,

226.

45 See

his analysis of the dramatic role of "The Renunciation of Love" leitmotiv from the point of view of mythic logic in the chapter "Myth and Music," in Myth and Meaning, op. cit., 46-50. 46 Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to a Science ofMythology, vol. 4, The Naked Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 654; and Myth and Meaning, 50-51, emphases mine. 47 See

Timothy P. Martin, "The Influence ofRichard Wagner and His Music-Dramas on the Works of James Joyce" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, I 981 ).

14

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend by right of generation to the Christian spirit, such as we commonly understand it: it has inherited them all from the purely human intuitions (Anschauungen) of earlier times, and merely moulded them to fit its own peculiar tenets. To purge them of this heterogeneous influence, and thus enable us to look straight into the pure humanity of the eternal poem [is a poet's task]. 48

An element of neo-mythological pluralism is apparent in Wagner's attempts to reach beyond Christianity to "prehistoric times," to perceive Christianity as a later variant of the ideas found in German and Greek myth. 49 However, his desire "to purge them of heterogeneous influence" is a Romantic ambition to transcend mythic thought. The hermeneutics of neo-mythologism embrace the aesthetics of religious-artistic hybrids. Wagner conceived Bayreuth as a temple to sacred rites. However, he had to re-actualize myths or conjure up new ones in order to achieve that ideal. It is important to realize that, for Wagner, Christianity was a myth for manipulation and that in general, myths were subsidiary to nationalist ideology. Middleton is correct in stating that in Wagner's dramas, "myth, from being the servant of religious ritual, is to become the handmaiden of the new religion, art. " 50 Wagner's syncretism likewise foreshadows twentieth-century artistic developments. When discussing Wagner's role as a precursor of later composers' involvement with syncretism, it is important to perceive his musical and non-musical structures as a unity. His position as a composer preoccupied with active mythmaking by means of music and word, united in a manner of archaic ritual, also influenced Scriabin. Minz names Wagner as one of the fathers of Russian symbolism: Already at the end of the nineteenth century, Russian symbolist poetry, under the influence of Nietzsche and Wagner, molds a concept of the development of modern art "from symbol to myth" (Vyacheslav Ivanov), and actively creates innovative "textmyths."51

48 "A

Communication to my Friends," in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William A. Ellis, vol. 1 (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 333-34.

49 Wagner

refers to "prehistoric times [ ... ] when Speech, and Myth, and Art were really born," Ibid., 289. 50Middleton,

"After Wagner," 307.

51 Minz, "O nekotorykh," 76. See also Rosamund Bartlett, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65-72; 117-218.

The Diachronic Perspective

15

Scriabin The "neo-mythologism" of Russian Symbolist literature fueled Scriabin's neo-mythologism. 52 Minz applied the terms "novel-myth" and "poem-myth" to several works of Scriabin's time. 53 The philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), who greatly influenced Russian symbolism, was himself affected by Schelling's philosophy and its embrace of mythopoetic thinking. Solovyov offered a view of the world as a myth-like text with specific "characters" and a "plot" about its evolution. He declared that cognitive processes related to artistic processes. In their critical writings, the Symbolist poets Konstantin Balmont ( 1867-1943) and Andrei Bely (1880-1934) interpreted myth poetically. 54 As Minz points out, an irrational worldview was juxtaposed with rational science and literary realism: Any work of art was now equal to myth. On the other hand, it was precisely myth in a narrower sense that became the highest sample for the modem art. Myth was understood as an expression of the prime and fundamental features of human culture; as a "clue" or a "cipher" for comprehension of the deepest meaning of modem history and art. Because the features of pre-logical thinking are easily seen in myth (such as symbolism, the magic function, the limitation of "reasoning," etc.), the tum to myth seemed to show a path out of the crisis of knowledge. Especially in the 1900s, myth also embodied the collective, "folk" consciousness, which was a social ideal of the time, a way to overcome individualism and subjectivism. To become myth was the goal of symbolism. In the future, the symbolists believed, the true mythmaking will be resurrected. 55

It is not surprising that Losev, a mythographer, devoted special essays to Scriabin and Wagner. As Faubion Bowers attests, ancient myths inspired Scriabin's everyday conversation, and mythic heroes lived in his imagination.56 A full analysis of Scriabin's mythologism requires an independent study. I present here only a smaller-scale outline of his version of neomythologism-like Wagner's, not conceived ironically, yet autocratically

52 0n the complex relationships between Russian symbolism and Scriabin's work, see Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, op. cit. 53Minz, "O nekotorykh," 77. 54Minz refers to Zmeinye zvety [Snake flowers] by Balmont and to Bely's article "Emblematika smysla" [The emblematics of meaning], ibid.

55 Minz, "O nekotorykh," 83. 56Scriabin:

A Biography, 2nd ed. (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996), 319.

16

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

fashioning old and new myths. Both composers remodel eschatological myths, revealing their kinship. In his Ring cycle, Wagner adopts myths about the end of the world; Scriabin's Mysterium was actually intended to cause the end of the world by transforming Matter into Spirit through incantatory music and to bring about humanity's reconciliation with the godhead. The view of art as a substitute for religion was shared by both Wagner and the poets and philosophers of Scriabin's milieu. 57 Brown draws a parallel between Scriabin and Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely, who "preached poetry as ancilla theologiae."58 The key notion here is preaching, to the point of transcending art; as Morrison effectively demonstrated, the composer had to pay for transcendental ideas the great price of his personal creative silence. Morrison adds that Scriabin went even further than these poets in his virtually insane attempt to execute the religious rite of his Mysterium by staging it. 59 Losev considers Scriabin's art-religion in a broader context of an acute crisis in European creative thought, separated from a specifically Russian context: In the individualistic anarchy of Scriabin is the highest achieve-

ment of European culture, but simultaneously also its highest negation. One cannot understand Scriabin without understanding and suffering through these terrible centuries of the new European culture in their distinction from the Middle Ages. Only the independence and the divinity of"self," of which the new Europe dreams-the Europe that exterminated religion and church-only these metaphysical matters make Scriabin and his philosophy understandable. Having transferred onto "self' religion, church, culture, science, and all being, Europe comes to its own negation. [... ] Scriabin again becomes astrologer and alchemist, magician and miracle-maker. Scriabin's "self' is the prophesy ofrevolution and of death of European gods. 60

Such post-Wagnerian composers as Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen express mythologism through religious or theosophical precepts, although they also make direct references to known myths (e. g., Prometheus in Scriabin, the Older Edda in Wagner). Typically, these religious or theosophical concepts extend beyond traditional orthodoxy, absorbing 57 See

Malcolm Brown, "Skriabin and Russian 'Mystic' Symbolism," Nineteenth-Century Music 3 (1979): 42-51. 58 Ibid.,

46.

59Russian

60Losev,

Opera and the Symbolist Movement, 197.

Mirovozzrenie Skriabina, 297.

The Diachronic Perspective

17

elements of myths and other spiritual teachings and establishing new, highly individualized, self-centered, and universalized versions of traditional liturgies. Wagner's music dramas symbolized religious pathos as redemption, an element that, as Hermann Danuser points out, infuses his major works. 61 However, Wagner also ''universalizes redemption in a work [Tannhiiuser] that is emphatically art-religious and yet critical of the church. "62 Like Wagner, Scriabin embraces a religious concept of redemption in universal terms. In the period around The Poem of Ecstasy (1907), he pronounced himself a theurgist who would redeem the whole of mankind from the decline of Spirit into Matter by means of the synthesis offered in his scores. 63 Scriabin perceives "the sacred" in terms broader than any particular institutionalized orthodoxy would allow. Many of Scriabin's works bear Christian references: his Symphony No. 3 (1904), for example, bears the subtitle Bozhestvennaya Poema (The Divine Poem), and his Piano Sonata No. 7 (1912) is known asBelaya Messa (The White Mass). Other works hint at demonism-notably, Satanicheskaya Poema (The Satanic Poem) of 1903 or the Piano Sonata No. 9 (1913), later subtitled Black Mass. This latter group of compositions justifies Losev's view that it was not the Christian God to whom Scriabin devoted his work. Paganism and demonism, Losev believes, influenced his music. Only paganism can be demonic, for only in paganism all imperfections and evils of the world are made divine [ ... ]. It is precisely from here that the demonism of Scriabin arises. Of course, Christianity too feels the demons; without them, it would not understand the evil of this world. But Christianity knows that the demons are evil; for in them it has a true instrument-all this evil dies from facing God's sacred cross. In paganism, however, one does not sense evil in the demc;mic. Demons are also divine, only perhaps, lower in range. A pagan loves his demons and worships them; for him it would be unthinkable to exterminate them. On the contrary, the demonic in paganism represents the beginning of religion and beauty, and the believers are intimately united with the demons. Such is Scriabin, who loves all things demonic, who calls himself evil, but who sees in this his very strength and beauty. 64 61 Hermann

Danuser, "Musical Manifestations of The End in Wagner and in Post-Wagnerian Weltanschauungsmusik," Nineteenth-Century Music 18 (1994), 65.

62 Ibid.,

69.

63 Sabaneev, 64Losev,

Vospominania, 102.

Mirovozzrenie Scriabina, 291.

18

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend He is one of the rare geniuses who give us an opportunity to feel paganism and its somewhat unbreakable truth. 65

The composer takes from Christianity the concept of history progressing towards a predetermined end, the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, a quality that Losev calls "Christian historicism." Scriabin is a queer mixture of pagan cosmic spirit with Christian historicism. He takes from paganism the most important feature that distinguishes it from Christianity-the immanent unity of God and the world. But he does not want the pagan stasis and the "eternal return."[ ... ] Therefore Christian historicism is allotted the pagan joy of divine flesh, the apocalypse becomes an erotic madness, and the redemption and the end of history is found in the individual demonism and heroism of the very tragic hero-Scriabin. 66

The chain of cosmological projects, including Haydn's The Creation, Beethoven's Ninth symphony, Wagner's music dramas, Mahler's symphonies, and Scriabin's works, continued in the second half of the twentieth century. Wagner envisioned Bayreuth; Scriabin hoped to build a great temple in India expressly for the production of his Mysterium. The gigantic, cosmic scale of his last unfinished project anticipates Stockhausen's grandiose operatic cycle Licht (begun in 1977). Scriabin's mythology foreshadows Stockhausen's, where the idea of the transformation of mankind through music also resides.

The Synchronic Perspective Hermeneutic constructs change over time. Nevertheless, mythologically rooted hermeneutic constructs possess remarkable stability. For instance, the "magic" significance of certain numbers, such as three or seven, or the mystic roles of certain geometric figures, such as a square, circle, or triangle, preserve their symbolism through time. In what follows, I will examine these stable characteristics before applying them to analyses of concrete works. First,_let us review the specificity of mythic logic and the mechanisms of the formation and memory of myths.

65 1bid.,

301.

66Ibid.,

294.

The Synchronic Perspective

19

The synchronic aspect of neo-mythologism is a particular manifestation of mythic thought. When we present archaic myths simply as linear narratives we disregard an important vertical dimension of myth as the well of culture. The very nature of mythic thought requires that it be reconstructed, as Plato put it, as a model (paradeigma) or even "a model of a model" (paradeigmatos paradeigma). The paradigmatic correlation of events in mythos means a precedent, or a sample pattern, repeated in all consequent events as if they were placed paradeiknunai (side by side, from Greek), contrary to the cause-and-effect linear or syntagmatic progression. Ritualsthe "consequent events"-grant the opportunity to reenact myths and explore their cyclical nature. Examples of mythic precedents include the discovery of fire and Persephone's abduction by the king of the Underworld, establishing the seasonal changes. The reiteration of the initial precedent in rituals is no less real than the precedent itself, so the events of the past, the present, and the future become interlocked with each other. Mythic time is thus formed. At the bottom of this well one finds a collection of precedents-models for imitation and reincarnation in varied forms. Such imitation allows a reawakening of cultural memory, a remembrance and reactualization of things past, an evocation of the ancestors. This aspect of mythic time may also serve as a hermeneutic model applicable to music, especially when dealing with certain types of stylization or quotation. A style of the past may be treated as a "precedent" for a consequent celebration. The Jungian aspect of neo-mythologism requires that we look at the collective unconscious as a repository of archetypes and their variances in artistic consciousness. The archetypes retain generic ties with mythic images, even if, in the conscious state, a person is unaware of them. They are not "pre-ordained and inflexible structures, but rather molds from which are produced forms that tum up as entities without being obliged to remain identical."67 Levi-Strauss believes that such a priori structures as geometrical forms are innate to the human mind. In Le regard eloigne (1983), he argues that these forms are biologically rooted: Today, advances in neurology give hope of resolving very old philosophical problems, such as the origin of geometric notions. But if first the eye and then the lateral geniculate bodies do not photograph objects but react selectively to abstract relationships -a horizontal, a vertical, or an oblique direction; the contrast between a figure and its background; and other such primary data from which the cortex reconstructs objects-it therefore no 67 Quoted

in Pandora Hopkins, "The Homology of Music and Myth: Views of Levi-Strauss on Musical Structure," Ethnomusicology 21(1977),252.

20

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend longer makes sense to ask whether geometric notions belong to a world of Platonic ideas or are drawn from experience: these notions are inscribed in the body. 68

If geometric notions are indeed inscribed in our bodies, human consciousness begins to resemble a computer program; hence the critics of the structural method accused it of dehumanization. On the other hand, how can dehumanization occur where, in fact, a study of archetypes common to all humans seeks to reduce cultural difference? Archetypes, basic images, or motives typically acquire a life of their own, reappearing in various guises throughout cultural history. Their number is limited, and they are understood as universal. Mythologems Migrating mythic images or motives, such as the mandala or the Arbor Mundi (the World Tree), are sometimes called "mythologems." Following Levi-Strauss, a mythologem can be said to reflect "the kind of language in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word."69 For example, a long, elaborate narrative stands behind the single mythologem of the Cosmic Tree in the version used by Wagner in the synopsis of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The term "mythologem" points directly to the mythological roots of a particular archetypal theme or motive and contains a reference to the logic of myth (mytho-logem ). Minz sees the function of a mythologem as a signsubstitute for the whole plot, which carries the memory of the past and future states of images used in a text. In this sense, a mythologem is a kind of program of the plot. Because a mythologem can signify a great number of metonymically similar situations and images, Minz also defines it as a symbol with unlimited meaning, "the sign of' everything. "'70 A number of mythologems are associated with geometric symbols, such as a circle, a sphere, a square, a triangle, a pyramid, a cross, or simply a straight vertical line. These figures, which constitute a special class of mythopoetic signs, convey the idea of structuring the universe and often represent a model of the Universe. One of the best-known examples is the combination of circle and square in mandalas (see Figure 1).

68 Claude

Levi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugrochel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 33. 69 See Levi-Strauss's discussion of the mytheme and metalanguage in Structural Anthropology, trans. Monique Layton, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 144. 70Minz,

"O nekotorykh," 95.

The Synchronic Perspective

21

FIGURE 1: a Tibetan mandala cited as figure 1 in C. G. Jung's "Mandala Symbolism"71

71 The

Collected Works ofC.G. Jung, vol. 9, part l (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

22

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend

Commonly found in mythologies are circularly shaped sacred ritualistic objects-bowls, rings, shaman's tambourines, among others. Each tradition emphasizes some aspect of world order. Campbell, for example, defined the idea of an eternal cycle of life as the motive of "great return." In his description of the circular Orphic bowl from Pietroasa, Romania, Campbell mixes figures from different mythologies and religions to show the universal character of this motive: In the center of the sacramental bowl as the pivotal form around which all revolves, sits the Great Goddess, by whatever name, within whose universal womb both night and day are enclosed. She is the one mother, both of life, as symbolized by Demeter, and of death, life's daughter, Persephone. The grapevine entwining her throne matches that of the outer margin of the bowl, and she holds with both hands a large chalice of the ambrosia of this vine of the universe: the blood of her ever reviving, ever-dying, slain and resurrected son, Dionysus-Bacchus-Zagreus (or in the older, Sumero-Babylonian myths, Dumuzi-absu, Tammuz), the child of the abyss. His blood thus offered, is the pagan prototype of the wine of the Christian sacrifice of the Mass, which has been transubstantiated by the words of consecration into the blood of the Son of the Virgin. 72

A vertical line shapes the mythologem of the World Tree, or Arbor Mundi, similar to the Axis Mundi. Both represent the idea of an axis penetrating and thus structuring the whole universe. Arbor Mundi also contains a horizontal dimension, layering the universe with its branches, while the World Mountain presents a triangle connecting the earth and the sky. The archetype of the Axis Mundi is represented as Ghunung-Aghung in Balinese mythology, while images of the World Tree inform Sumatrian (Figure 2) and Siberian mythology (Figure 3). 73 These mythologems rely structurally on the "molds, from which are produced forms"-in Levi-Strauss's definition, basic structural ideas that include binary opposition, symmetry, and repetition.

72 Joseph

Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 391.

73 Grigory

Bandilenko, "Ghunung-Aghung," in Eugene Meletinsky, ed., Mifologicheskii slovar' [The dictionary of mythology], 166.

The Synchronic Perspective FIGURE 2: the World Tree of Sumatrian mythology

(detail of ceremonial cloth, Kroe, Sumatra)74

74Roger

Cook, The Tree of Life (New York: Avon Books, 1974).

23

24

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend FIGURE3: the World Tree of Siberian mythology. Birch bark from the

Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, St. Petersburg, Russia. 75

The Operational Modes and Archetypes of (Neo-) Mythic Thought Due to the reactualization of the precedent from mythic time, repetition replaces the relationship of reason and consequence. 76 The interchangeability of elements within a paradigmatic structure results in a state in which "anything is likely to happen [ ... ] any characteristic can be attributed to any subject, any conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible." 77 The combinatory mold thus typifies the way that mythic thought operates. 75 Vladimir Toporov, "Drevo mirovoe" in S. Tokarev, ed., Mif.y Narodov Mira [The myths of the world's peoples], vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskaya encyclopedia, 1997), 399. 760lga Freidenberg

and Vladimir Propp, Mifil literatura drevnosti [Myth and literature of the Antiquity] (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 6. 77Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schopf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 208.

The Synchronic Perspective

25

In the twentieth century, these structural molds take on a role independent of tonality, the long-dominating major structural force. The combinatorial and repetitive molds (the former a characteristic, for example, of aleatorics, and the latter of minimalist music) are important categories of twentieth-century compositional thought. The mythologems sometimes also serve as compositional models. The question of whether composers "consciously" applied these molds and mythologems as compositional models may be answered from a Jungian perspective. The mythologems are attributed initially to the unconscious layer of the human mind. However, in the creative process, a conscious appropriation of an unconscious discovery takes place, and application of archetypes may become self-conscious on the part of a composer. Several composers that are examined in the present book possessed previous knowledge of archetypal models, as the reader will see from the following chapters. Here I will cite only brief exemplary evidence supporting my argument. Crumb, who wrote, "A strong initial conception for a piece of music must come from deep within the psyche," mentioned owning Jung's books. 78 In the 1997 interview, Crumb portrayed himself as someone familiar with different mythological traditions, from Greek to Norse, finding inspiration in standard texts on the subject. I have Edith Hamilton's book on Greek mythology. I have read that book: she is very good on the myths! These are retellings of the myths in a very concise way. She also has a short book on Norse mythology. She has also written The Way of the Greeks, which is one of the greatest books ever written. [ ... ] There is another writer, Bulfinch, who has a book called World Mythology, which I read, and looked through some other books by him. 79

Crumb's approach to myth also involves what Meletinsky ascribed to neo-mythologism as "the universalizing and metaphorical [ ... ] play of the imagination," demonstrably so in Ancient Voices of Children (1970). Here, Crumb testified referring to an imaginary Indian Ghost Dance, which he described as

78 Interview with Robert Shuffett, in Profile of a Composer, 35, and Interview at Rutgers University, December 1997 (see Appendix). In a telephone conversation (January 14, 200 I), Crumb also specified that one of his books on Jung addressed mythology. Crumb recalled reading this book early in his career. 79Interview

at Rutgers University, ibid.

26

A Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend an ancient mythological dance. I used it just as a title [in movement IV], referring to a mysterious character, after reading about it in one of the books on Indian mythology. 80 •

While a neo-mythological author is self-conscious about mythic archetypes and their universalizing power, and about Jungian interpretation thereof, he or she also relies on numerology-the other "universal" pattembuilding structural force behind myths. Jung defined it as the part of mythic thought that helps "to organize the play of archetypes [ ... ] into a certain pattern, so that a 'reading' becomes possible."81 Myths strive to establish a state of order in the human mind. Numbers, according to Jung, establish "an archetype of order which has become conscious."82 The numerological structures and symbols often used in myths "not only express order, they create it."83 Numerology is one of the "first principles" of archaic mythology. Another such principle is systemic correspondence between various elements of the world. The French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Brohl showed that each totemic group had a mystic association with the land, which in turn had associations with certain colors, winds, animals, woods, rivers, etc. The principle of correspondences will be one of my major tools for analysis of artistic systemology in chapter 5. This principle is one of the ways in which mythology emerges as a system. Correspondences help to create the paradigmatic aspect of a text, and the correlation of macrocosmic and microcosmic elements conveys a universal unity. Twentieth-century culture longed for survival, sanity, healing, and restoration. It is only natural that some composers would reinvent systematic correspondences that evoke mythic systemology. For many centuries, the latter proved useful, as it provided an antidote against the disruption and fragmentation of consciousness.

801bid.

In a phone conversation on March 14, 2003, Crumb confirmed that he has never seen an Indian Ghost Dance that has served as a prototype for this movement, and added: "I do that a lot-using something that I have never seen myself, but read about." 81 Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, vol. 14 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 294. 82

Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, in Collected Works ofC. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2d ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 456. 83 Ibid.,

457.

TWO

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music In a comparative study, Fran9ois-Bemard Mache defines structural processes that apply equally to mythology and music as "universal procedures of treatment." By "universal," Mache understands that certain formal procedures of both myth and music, due to their similar trans-historical presence in different contexts, are separate from stylistic differences and historical evolution: Evidently, a number of myths and a number of musics are almost peculiar to this or that culture, but this does not prevent the existence of certain universals in music being worthy of consideration, just as much as the universality of certain generative thoughts or mythems. 1

Mache's universal procedures of treatment clearly parallel Levi-Strauss's concept of molds. These include binary opposition, repetitiveness, variability, symmetry, and numerical organization. Also related is Levi-Strauss's notion of"bricolage," which refers to one of the ways in which the principle of variability unfolds, but it also can be considered a relatively autonomous means of structuring. Bricolage corresponds to combinatorics, which by itself stands for combinatorial mathematics, the field concerned with problems of selection, arrangement, and operation within a finite or discrete system, and the closely related area of combinatorial geometry. For the specific purposes of comparing myth and music, I use the derivative term "combinatoriality" in place of the more mathematically oriented term "combinatorics." Combinatoriality is defined as a type of structuring, based on a finite set of elements. Combinations of these elements form larger entities between which elements can be traded. Twentieth-century composers developed an interest in structuring elementary material. While in the nineteenth century chord and motive served 1Francois-Bemard Mache, Music, Myth and Nature (Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992), 22.

27

The Prime Strocturing "Molds" of Myth and Music

28

as the finite atoms of musical creation, in the twentieth century, especially with Webern, this limit shifted to a single pitch, timbre, and dynamic, all of which gained independence. "Bare" structures, such as symmetrically organized series, formed the basis of a composition; the search for the components of a single tone led composers to acoustical experiments with the sources of sound. As other structural forces began to co-exist with tonality, the prime structural molds grew increasingly independent from the logic of tonal relationships. Though these molds were always part of music, the tonal system obscured their pure and untamed forms. I will begin with the most prominent of all Levi-Strauss's "molds"binary opposition, because of its special role in mythic thought.

Binary Opposition Levi-Strauss considered binary opposition the major characteristic of mythic thinking. The system ofbinary oppositions with its mediator, as LeviStrauss describes it, plays an important role in smoothing over the contradictions between the polar objects of the human mind, such as lifedeath, male-female, day-night ... Mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution. [ ... ] Two opposite terms with no intermediary always tend to be replaced by two equivalent terms which admit of a third one as a mediator; then one of the polar terms and the mediator become replaced by a new triad, and so on.2

A mythic trickster (in North American myths, a coyote or a raven) enables a reconciliation of the final opposition, being related to both poles, as Levi-Strauss demonstrates in the following chart: INITIAL PAIR Life

FIRST TRIAD Agriculture

SECOND TRIAD

Herbivorous animals Carrion-eating animals (raven; coyote)

Hunting Warfare

Beast of prey

Death 2Structural Anthropology,

1963), 224.

trans. Cl. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books,

Binary Opposition

29

Analyzing a group of myths, Levi-Strauss discerns the fundamental opposition "life-death," which does not offer a mediator (left column). He finds a replacement for that irreconcilable opposition through a similar, but weaker opposition, "agriculture-warfare" (middle column). By embodying elements of agriculture (animals) and warfare (killing), "hunting" mediates between them. Thus the triad "agriculture-hunting-warfare" constricts the initial opposition. Finally, the mediators in the third column are the raven and the coyote, carrion-eating animals, which combine the opposite features of the second triad. Levi-Strauss considers binary oppositions in the same chapter of Structural Anthropology in which he draws the analogy between myth and a musical score. 3 In his other work, Levi-Strauss places the opposition between ternary and binary rhythmic groupings at the center of his analysis of Ravel's Bolero to demonstrate the similarity between myth and music. 4 The oppositions of mythic thinking express themselves in music as relationships between the discrete and the indiscrete; regular and irregular; sound and silence; dynamic and static; high and low. In the classical tonal system the hierarchy oftonal functions promoted the inequality of opposites: for example, the dominant, if considered an opposite of the tonic, ultimately subordinated to the latter. In the twentieth-century, under a condition of only a ghostly presence of the classical tonal system, binary opposites frequently come to the foreground of musical thought. Oppositional thinking with mediation is characteristic of several major twentieth-century composers, among them Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg, whose ideas I have chosen to illustrate this statement. While the binaries in their compositions have been often noted, the idea of mediation, and indeed the link between opposition and mediation in the context of mythic structure, has yet to be probed. The ensuing discussion deals with two different manifestations of oppositional structuring and mediating in the output of each of these composers. Hindemith's Oppositive Thinking: Is Mediation Possible on Earth? James D 'Angelo was the first to point to the fundamentally important role of binary opposition in Hindemith's work, particularly on the level of pitch organization. In his theoretical writings, Hindemith emphasized the antagonism between tonalities, based on the tritone's "antagonistic striving 3Chapter

11, "The Structural Study of Myth" in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Gnmdfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 20 l-228.

4Introduction

to the Science of Mythology, vol. 4: The Naked Man, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper &Row, 1981), 666.

30

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

against the tonic." 5 This antagonism gains a symbolic meaning for Hindemith, summarized as follows by D' Angelo: Each character [in the opera Die Harmonie der Welt] embodies a primary mode of being [ ... ] which aligns itself to a positive and/or negative polarization of thought and action. To symbolize this polarity Hindemith used pairs of tritone-apart tonalities. [... ] Overall there are relatively few moments in Die Harmonie der Welt when the principle of tritone opposition, to one degree or another, is not in operation. 6

As D' Angelo demonstrates in his analysis, every key has either a negative or a positive symbolic meaning in the context of Hindemith's opera, and this system reflects its entire philosophical theme: Hindemith's overriding theme in Harmonie [ ... ] is that the life of humanity on Earth consists of a polarization of positive and negative forces, which cannot be resolved by humanity's own efforts of will. Rather than ever being reconciled, these polarities must be transcended and resolved in the afterlife state where there can be a union between human beings and the Harmony of the Universe. 7

Absent from D'Angelo's discussion, however, is the mediation of the extreme opposition between E (which symbolizes universal Harmony) and B~ (which symbolizes Earthly imperfection) by a number of inner pairs of opposition, for example, the opposition between Kepler (C#) and his opponents on Earth (G), and between Heaven (C) and Earth (F#). To demonstrate these oppositions graphically, I use Hindemith's Series 1, taken from his music theory, in D' Angelo's application to the specific tonal organization of the opera, in a transposition to a major third above, that is, C to E: 8 "Heaven" "Earth"

E

B

"Universal Harmony"

A

C#

"Kepler"

G#

G

c

"Kepler's opponents"

F#

D "God"

F

B~ "Earthly Imperfection"

E~

---------

main opposition

5Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, vol. 3: Three-Part Writing, trans. Coman, as quoted in James D'Angelo, "Tonality Symbolism in Hindemith's Opera 'Die Harmonie Der Welt,"' Hindemith-Jahrbuch/Annales Hindemith 14 (1985), 104.

6J.

D'Angelo, "Tonality Symbolism in Hindemith's Opera 'Die Harmonie Der Welt,"' 105.

71bid.,

128.

81bid.,

103.

Binary Opposition

31

This particular version of Hindemith's Series /begins on the pitch E and ends on B~, both pitches representing the extreme tonal poles and extramusical meanings he assigned to them in the opera. Although the scheme of oppositive-mediating organization here differs from the one suggested by Levi-Strauss, some pairs of symbolically interpreted keys within the series provide meaningful mediation between the extreme poles. The structure of the series and the extra-musical meanings attached to certain keys also provide a narrowing of the fundamental opposition between the "Universal harmony" (E) and "Earthly imperfection" (B~). Indeed, graphically, the pair "Kepler-God" (C#-D) is symmetrically equally distant from the extreme poles. The pitch class C# associated with the figure of Kepler is equally distant from both poles E and B~ (at the one-and-a half tone). Keeping in mind that for Hindemith, the distance between the tones defines their relationships, the C# constitutes a mediator from this point of view. Since Hindemith identified with the figure of Kepler, the mediating role of this character and his key is especially important. 9 The identification with Kepler illustrates that Hindemith's cosmology is thus self-centered, as is typical for other neo-mythological thought, including that of Schoenberg. Schoenberg, the Mediator of Opposites Although Schoenberg regarded the term atonal music as "most unfortunate," its popularity and durability in music terminology may have been provoked by the composer's own inclination toward opposites. Dualism is a prominent feature in his thought, as several scholars have noted: Robert Fleisher, in particular, demonstrates that dualism is the main feature of Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aron. 10 The opposition of the "Spirit" (Moses) and the "Image" (Aron) is not limited to the subject matter but reveals itself in the music through many elements. Among these are the structure of the main twelve-tone row, the use of opposite extremes of register, contrasting rhythms and textures, instrumental and timbral contrasts, motivic work, and formal organization (the bipartite organization of scenes and juxtaposition of binary and ternary forms). Fleisher goes as far as to point out Schoenberg's "predilection for contrastive and oppositional musical design," and "the polarization of materials," as well as the dualistic nature of Schoenberg's "idea" in general, illustrated by many fragments from 9As D 'Angelo points out, in this opera, "Kepler, whose life and pursuits paralleled much in Hindemith's own life and work[ ... ] represents Hindemith himself." D'Angelo, "Tonality Symbolism," 100 and 128. 10 See "Dualism in the

12 (1989): 22-39.

Music of Arnold Schoenberg," Journal ofArnold Schoenberg Institute

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

32

the composer's theoretical writings. 11 The following passages from Schoenberg are examples of his oppositional thinking; the first passage constitutes a general aesthetic statement, while the second refers to traditional tonal theory: An idea achieves distinctness and validity in contrast with others.

[... ] Musical thinking is subject to the same dialectic as all other thinking. 12 In a key, opposites are at work, binding together. Practically, the

whole thing consists exclusively of opposites, and this gives the strong effect of cohesion. 13 In addition to Fleisher's commentary, it is worth mentioning that, while the latter passage is applicable to tonal music, twelve-tone composition, according to Schoenberg, lacks oppositional structure as it no longer features dissonance versus consonance opposition. 14 Therefore, it constitutes a problem for a composer: a substitute for the principle of opposites is necessary. In his 1923 article, "Twelve-Tone Composition," Schoenberg singles out two pairs of opposites: old resources versus new resources and old art versus new art, the "new" associated here with twelve-tone composition. As Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff observe, Schoenberg sometimes called tonal harmony "old harmony," which shows his preference for the terms "new" and "old." 15 The opposition of nature versus culture-the chief opposition in LeviStrauss' s model of mythic structuring-is notable in Schoenberg's distinction between the laws of nature and the exceptional, that is, not justifiable by natural laws, essence of art. Attempts to base art entirely on nature will continue to be abortive. The attempt to formulate artistic law can at most have the merit of a good comparison (that of influencing perception). This is a considerable merit. [... ] Yet one must never imagine that such miserable achievements constitute eternal laws comparable to the 11 Ibid.,

30 and 31.

12Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals ofMusical Composition,

ed. Gerald Strang (New York:

St. Martin Press, 1967), 94. 13 Arnold

Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (New York, St. Martins Press, 1975), 209. 141bid.,

15 See

207.

The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 61.

Binary Opposition

33

laws of nature. I repeat: natural law is true without exception, but theories of art consist mainly of exceptions. 16 Fleisher suggests that the dualism of Schoenberg's thought may be rooted in the traditional symbols of Jewish mysticism, visualized in a Tree of Life and the menorah. The dualistic aspect of these mystical concepts [... ] is rooted in the polarities of the human condition: masculine and feminine, active and passive, positive and negative, all surrounding the central axis of equilibrium. 17

Whether or not this particular alignment can indeed be proven, the transcultural nature of the Tree of Life mythologem places Schoenberg's oppositional thinking in a broader perspective, one that sees Jewish mystic symbols as representative of mythic thought in general. The presence in Schoenberg's thinking of the second feature pertinent to traditional mythic conception-the mediation of the opposites-so far has evaded scholars' attention. It is likely that the conventional apparatus of music analysis, rooted as it is in the late romantic traditions highlighting of opposites, still blocks our view of mediation. Adorno, in particular, as Rose Subotnik points out, built his argument along "the negative tendency of dialectics" as to emphasize "the tension of dialectical contradictions."18 In her shrewd criticism of Adorno's so-called "negative dialectics," Subotnik incorporates a view of the modern French structuralists with their attempts to "bring their [ ... ] discontinuous binary oppositions [ ... ] into a system," clearly implying Levi-Strauss's notion of mediation, as she notices that Adorno "failed to find such a principle in music." 19 Lydia Goehr, exploring Adorno-Schoenberg correlations, interprets Schoenberg in Adorno' s terms linked to his "negative dialectics," thus also highlighting dualism. She writes: The strategy of negation was crucial. The way music voiced truth was not through positive utterances of content or empty promises of happiness-Aron's voice-but rather through the oblique, silent, or subcutaneous (formal) relations obtaining between the 16Arnold

Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1922), 5-6, as quoted in John F. Spratt, "The Speculative Content of Schoenberg's Harmonielehre," Current Musicology 11 (1971), 84. 17Fleisher,

"Dualism in the Music of Arnold Schoenberg," 27.

18 Rose

Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music, (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35. 19 Ibid.,

207-208.

34

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music works or words-Moses' s voice-and the listening public. But yet-and here was the profound conflict-there could never be the one (pure) voice without the other (impure) voice. 20

Although John Covach sought to deconstruct dualism as a philosophical foundation for musical analysis, 21 he nevertheless developed a hermeneutical concept featuring a dual opposition-that of "this world" (of German masterworks prior to Schoenberg) and the "other world" of Schoenberg's atonality and his spirituality. 22 The refusal to suppose that a tendency for mediation between the opposites within a composer's world of ideas could be plausible inevitably instigates cultural alienation. Perhaps, a cross-cultural, or even a meta-cultural approach (revealing similarity of archetypes in multiple cultures) will finally allow the possibility to distinguish mediation in Schoenberg's music, including the view of the composer himself as the mediator of opposites. It may not be immediately apparent that Schoenberg often progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution. The composer's important distinction between style and idea, in the essay collections and the essay of the same name, seemingly only illustrates the binary "dialectics" of his theoretical thought. However, in other theoretical writings and some musical works he reconciles several important oppositions. A closer look at the dramatic concept of the opera Moses and Aron gives a palpable example of such a resolution of opposites. In the opposition of God and the Hebrew people, for instance, Moses appears as the mediator; in tum, the opposition of Moses and the Hebrew people is mediated by Aron. Middleton pertinently sensed this mediating function, when he pointed to Schoenberg's desire "to heal the psychic split through re-living the original disintegration, to reconcile the Moses and Aron within himself. " 23 In his ethics as a human being, Schoenberg emphasized the notion of mediation, especially needed in the time of crisis in European culture during World War I. In a 1916 letter to Busoni, who wrote an article about peace, Schoenberg offered himself as a mediator:

20Lydia Goehr, "Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien," Journal of American Musicological Society 56 (2003), 604. 21 "Destructuring Cartesian Dualism in Musical Analysis," Music

Theory Online 0.11 (1994).

22 See

John Covach, "Schoenberg's Tum to an 'Other' World," Music Theory Online 115 (1995), 30.

23 Richard

Middleton, "After Wagner: the Place of Myth in Twentieth-century Music," The Music Review 3 (1973), 321.

Binary Opposition

35

I am suffering terribly from this war. How many closed relationships with the finest people it has severed; how it has corroded half my mind away and shown me that I can no better survive with the remainder that with the corroded portion. Please send me your article about peace[ ... ] If only we two and the likes ofus in every country could sit down and deliberate on a peace settlement. Within a week we could pass it on to the world and with it a thousand ideas which would suffice for half eternity, for a half-eternal peace. Yes, men are evil. But not so evil that one could not mediate between them. 24

There are more of Schoenberg's theoretical concepts that feature mediation as a structural foundation. He seems to look for mediation, or a common ground, between the new and the old, suggesting that both the new and the old art express the same laws, the former being a reaction to the latter: [The avoidance of consonances and simpler dissonances in twelve-tone composition] is, presumably, just one manifestation of a reaction, one that does not have its own special causes but derives from another manifestation-which it tries to contradict, and whose laws are therefore the same, basically, as its own. A later time will perhaps (!) be allowed to use both kinds of resources in the same way, one alongside the other, just as recently a mixed style, partly homophonic, partly polyphonic, permitted these two principles of composition (which in fact differed far more) to mix-although it would be stretching a point to call it a happy mixture. 25

Schoenberg's notion ofunity, which stretches beyond tonality or atonality, is primarily thematic in nature. This mediates the opposition between the tonal and the atonal. Schoenberg is equally concerned with the overall wholeness and unity of a composition in his tonal theory and in his atonal music. In tonal theory, his concept of"monotonality"and his care for proper voice-leading, rather conservative compared to other aspects of his tonal theory, aim to create a coherent unity. The perfection of voice-leading allows for linearly justified progressions to remote regions. Stretching beyond tonal theory, Schoenberg preferred the all-inclusive labels "pantonal," "polytonality," and "pantonality," all of which emphasize the notion of unity, as opposed to the destructive "atonality."In remarkable contrast to Rudolph 24Ferruccio

Busoni, Selected Letters, trans. Antony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 419. 25 Schoenberg,

Style and Idea, 207.

36

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

Reti, who meticulously limited the term pantonality only to the area of the pre-twelve-tone extension of tonal language, 26 Schoenberg would rather use the same term, "tonality," for the new contents, such as the twelve-tone series. His wide definition of "tonal" reaches beyond those historical periods and styles that were traditionally associated with tonality in the narrower sense. Schoenberg implies the underlying presence of tonality even in the socalled "church modes" and sees a parallel between that era and modem times: If one insists on looking for names, "polytonal" or "pantonal" could be considered. Yet, before anything else, we should determine whether it is not again simply "tonal"[ ... ]. There has been no investigation at all of the question whether the way these new sounds go together is not actually the tonality of a twelve-tone series. It is indeedprobably just that, hence would be a phenomenon paralleling the situation that led to the church modes, of which I say [the following]. The effect of a fundamental tone was felt, but since no one knew which tone it was, all of them were tried. 27

Thus it is clear why Schoenberg disliked the term "atonal." Again, a unifying tendency, with its characteristic ahistorical color, underlies this thought. In the quoted passage, both the church modes and atonality meet under the general classification "tonal." Schoenberg's definition of tonality grows to an all-embracing category, broad enough to mediate between different types of pitch organization, such as modality, atonality, twelve-tone system, and polytonality. An example of mediation appears in Schoenberg's own tonal theory. Three out of four musical examples on page 3 of Structural Functions of Harmony demonstrate "roving harmony" processes in which "no succession of three chords can unmistakably express a region or a tonality" (Figure 4). 28 Schoenberg's introduction of roving harmonies early in his textbook, as opposed to a later discussion as in most tonal harmony texts, speaks to the importance the concept had for Schoenberg. One explanation of this special significance is the mediating role of roving harmonies between tonality and atonality. In tonal music, this type of harmonic progression has typically served as a tonally unstable transitional passage, as Schoenberg notes in his commentary on the examples. Within an atonal composition, the same type 26 Rudolph Reti, in Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 69, describes pantonality as "an atonal tonality" with "movable tonics, tonics of different kinds." 27 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 432. [emphasis mine] 28 Arnold

Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony (New York: Norton, 1954), 3.

37

Binary Opposition

of progression, where voices are linked exclusively on a linear melodic basis, would be recognized as commonplace. It can be found easily in Schoenberg's own atonal music. (See Figure 5 for an example from his piano piece op. 11, no.2.) Another fragment from the same piece looks even more like Schoenberg's textbook illustration of roving harmonies because of the presence of triadic chords, although brief and elusive. (These are circled on Figure 6.) Here, a moderate tempo permits one to discern triadic harmonies, such as F-Ab-D~ in measure seven; its enharmonic return at the end· of the same measure (F-G#-C#); the second inversion of the triad E-G-B in measure eight, upper staff; and the two chords that represent the first inversion of triads F-Ab-C and C#-E-G# in measure eight. FIGURE 4: Schoenberg's demonstration of roving harmonies,

in Structural Functions ofHarmony, page 3 c)Roving I

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FIGURE 6 :Triadic harmonies in Schoenberg's op. 11, no. 2, mm. 7-8

38

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

Even though Schoenberg doubted the possibility of a union of opposites, the grounds for their mediation appears in his output both as a theorist and a composer. It is not only in his later works, such as Moses and Aron or even the Fourth quartet, that he combines "old" and "new" resources in one composition. 29 Even in Schoenberg's early works written prior to his statement of 1923 contrasting the two, Christopher Wintle finds "the integration of the old with the new, and not just the old or the new considered independently."30 Comparing certain harmonic progressions from Berg's reduction of Schoenberg's Quartet, op. 7 (1905) with Schoenberg's instructive examples from his Harmonielehre, Wintle demonstrates how the former, seemingly more complicated, derive from the traditional procedures of the latter. Moreover, as one concludes from Wintle's analysis, even the most non-traditional and radical tone relations, which seem to be looking forward to twelve-tone organization, can be drawn from the same "school exercises" and instructions Schoenberg provides when he discusses theory. In particular, old resources are given new life because of Schoenberg's approval of the dual properties of chords, such as the augmented triad. It can function both as a result of a passing tone in a linear motion or "as a chord within its own right[ ... ] which gives rise to (twelve-tone) systematic symmetries."31 Wintle finds a similar type of triadic connection between Schoenberg's theoretical-instructive concept, its traditional facet represented in his own composition, and its non-traditional potential in the song Traumleben, op. 6, no.l. Here, Schoenberg's concept of fluctuating tonality applies as a guideline for the analysis, as well as the notion of altered triads and combined major and minor modes. 32 Wintle's is the unifying and reconciling position in acknowledging the co-existence of the old and new, in contrast to the somewhat more traditional and uncompromising approaches of both Allen Forte and Will Ogdon, who analyze op.11, no. l, from diametrically opposed positions, the former viewing it as "Schoenberg's first atonal masterwork," and the latter discussing "how tonality functions in it." In his foreword to the two analyses, Leonard Stein (who, like Wintle, acts as a mediator) admits that Schoenberg, in fact, was "reluctant to define unequivocally the boundaries 29 A later theorist describes the Largo of the Fourth Quartet as "an organic synthesis of tonal thought and the strict twelve-tone procedures of Schoenberg's aggregate-forming compositions of the 30s." Sylvina Milstein, Arnold Schoenberg: Notes, Sets, Forms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 184. 3°Christopher

W. Wintle, "Schoenberg's Harmony: Theory and Practice," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 4 ( 1980), 51.

31 Ibid., 54. 320n fluctuating tonality, see Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, chapter XIX.

Binary Opposition·

39

between tonality and atonality. " 33 Hence, the whole field of mediation serves as a kind of "neutral zone"between the concepts of tonality and atonality. This is because, despite his own theoretical juxtaposition of the new and the old resources, many issues of Schoenberg's tonal theory imply the possibility of atonal relationships. For instance, his "harmonies with multiple meanings" -the "vagrants"-may occasionally proceed in conflict with the theory of root progressions."34 These harmonies are each open to free interpretation, including considerations outside of traditional tonality. Schoenberg's binary thinking, his mixture of tonal and atonal systems, is only one of many instances of twentieth-century phenomena that require similar terms (such as "mixture of tonal and atonal") for their interpretation. Other Instances ofBinary Opposition at Work Binary opposition and the principles of polarization and mediation also play an important role in the creative thought of other twentieth-century composers. 35 I will only point to a few randomly selected cases without elaborating on each. Scriabin is an early example. He claimed that as the result of the performance of the Preliminary Action, "male and female polarization would vanish. The divine androgyny of two sexes in one (as Plato envisaged them) would first return and then become a nullity."36 His contemporaries testify that "Scriabin resolved the opposing pulls of reason by placing himself in the center of the polarity."37 A source of Scriabin's oppositive thinking may be found in Buddhism (part of Scriabin's study), where one finds an opposition oflower (earthly) and upper (divine) planes, as well as in the opposition of culture versus nature. By contrast with Scriabin, who attached a highly sacred meaning to opposites and their reconciliation, oppositive structures and materials in Stravinsky's works show a certain playfulness. Their fairy-tale character apparently does not specifically seek mediation, which would be appropriate 33 Leonard

Stein, "Foreword: Tonal or Atonal?" Journal of Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5 (1981), 122. 34 Schoenberg,

Structural Functions ofHarmony, XVI.

35 Tue

role of binary opposition in twentieth-century music has not been addressed in its entirety; only individual cases have been considered. See the discussion of the opposition "death-sleep," a very typical opposition of mythology, in Berg's music: Magnar Brevik, "The Representation of Sleep and Death in Berg's 'Piano Songs,' op. 2," in Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music, ed. Siglind Bruhn (New York: Garland, 1998), 109-36. 36 Faubion Bowers,

1975), 125. 37 Ibid.,

124.

The New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers (New York: St. Martin's Press,

40

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

for a sacred myth dealing with the problem of reconciliation of life-anddeath-type polarities. In his light, ironic, and purely representational approach to opposing materials, Stravinsky tends to stress their elementary nature, particularly through notation. The "Petrushka chord," for example, in its original piano version, employs a visually perceived opposition of white versus black keys, coordinated with the opposition of the right hand against the left. 38 Pagan Slavic mythology features the opposition of black versus white through the White God (Belbog) against the Black God (Chemobog). Stravinsky may have been familiar with this mythological opposition in the libretto of Glinka's fairy-tale opera Ruslan and Ludmila. Jungian unconscious restoration of the mythically archetypal associated with neo-mythologism may be responsible for Stravinsky's reconstruction of this opposition, even ifthe concrete Belbog/Chemobog opposition was not specifically his model. After all, the universal black-and-white opposition constitutes one of the most elementary structures widely employed in myth. Accidentals act as another kind of binary opposition in Stravinsky's compositions. At rehearsal number 18 of Les Noces, in the Piano III and IV parts (Figure 7) Stravinsky reinforces the opposition of flats against sharps by combining them in contrasting descending versus ascending motion. He FIGURE 7: Stravinsky, Les Noces [18], Piano III and IV parts: the opposition of flats versus sharps

Piano IV

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&"'-----------------------------------' 38 See Richard Taruskin's detailed analysis of the "Petrushka chord" in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 403-6 and 749.

Binary Opposition

41

uses here a total twelve-tone pitch collection that results from a mixture of octatonic and whole-tone components. Both examples demonstrate how Stravinsky's compositional ideas were sometimes based on the archetypal binary patterns typical of mythological structuring. In the second half of the century, Crumb in Makrokosmos II (1973) followed Stravinsky's path by using the opposition of black and white keys in modal contexts. Robert Shuffet, in his detailed analysis of the score, notices "a dichotomy of black-key pentatonic versus white-key pentatonic, [which] often dominates other textural considerations," in "Morning Music," the opening piece of the Makrokosmos cycle. 39 Indeed, the passages consisting of all-black and all-white keys are played by separate hands as two variants of a single "sonic-entity," to borrow Shufett's term,40 the one based on a whole-tone scale. Shared modal contents in both cases serve as a field of mediation for black and white polarities. (Figure 8) FIGURE 8:

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Among these motivic cells, none is a "main" or "archetypal" motive; it is the sum of all the motives, their paradigmatic reflection in each other, that here constitutes Stravinsky's melodic and rhythmic idea. In the second half of the twentieth century, the libretto of Stockhausen's seven-opera cycle Licht (1977-2004) demonstrates the use of variability as a major structural mechanism. 105 In this libretto, written by the composer, a micro-process of verbal variability based on the exchange of syllables serves as a structural model for the music. This is characteristic in particular of Donnerstag aus Licht (1978-80}-the "Thursday" (each opera corresponds to one of the days of the week). In Stockhausen's own words: The phonetic juxtapositions generate [ ... ] a series of neologisms full of extraordinary messages. The names altered by the continual exchange of the syllables disclose an infinite number of combinations. Michael-Lucifer-Eve become Micheva-Luzeva and Michavael, Mondeva-the Eve of the moon. The hundreds of verbal conjunctions create among the characters involved situations that are always new. Thus the secret meaning of the words surfaces at the level of consciousness, and music is made. [ ... ] The operation whereby life becomes music begins here. 106

105 For general information on the work, see Maconie, The Works ofKarlheinz Stockhausen, 2nd ed., 261-294; John Allison et al., "Whither Opera: The Composers Speak Out," Opera 52 (2000), 170-172; on symbolism in Licht, see Giinter Peters, Holy Seriousness in the Play (Cologne: Stockhausen-Verlag, 2004), ch. 4. 106Mya Tannenbaum, Conversation with Karlheinz Stockhausen, trans. David Butchart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 60.

Variability and Combinatoriality

71

The entire libretto ofDonnerstag is a constant bricolage of syllables and phonemes of speech. These correspond to the cells of the musical fabric. Just one example demonstrates the combinatoriality in the text of the libretto. In Act 1, scene 3, "Examen," the vocal part of the main character, Michael, contains various permutations and exchanges of syllables among the names of the three central characters: Michael, Eva, and Lucifer. Multiple neologisms are thus being formed. In section VI of the 1st Exam, in particular, the following combinations of syllables and phonemes appear: u

i a LUM-MI-NA uiaLU-CIFA u ea LU-CE FA u e a LU-CE-VA e a LI-CHE-VA e a MI-CHE-VA a e MI-CHA-VE a e MI-CHA-EL MI-CHA-HELL

Through the combinatorial operations with these particles of speech, Stockhausen uses 7 consonants (L, M, C, H, F, N, V) and 4 vowels (u, i, a, e), achieving the following 14 combinations: Lum Lu Li Mi

Ci Ce Che Cha

Na Fa Va Ve

eL Hell

Each column displays modifications of syllables in their succession. They are connected by a common phoneme (either a consonant or a vowel), for example, an assonance Li-Mi, or an alliteration Che-Cha. Sometimes a form of altered reversal is used, such as in "eL" as a variant reversal of "Li." A meaningful modification of the name of the protagonist of the opera, Michael, as MI-CHA-HELL, marks the end of this section (VI) of the libretto. This modification clearly has a marked function. In the German original, the combination "CHE" in words like "MI-CHE-VA" phonetically approximates "HE" in "HELL," and thus is prepared by the whole process of combinatoriality. In the same fragment Stockhausen builds 4 combinations of 4 vowels, 3 in each group: u 1 a u e a i e a 1 a e

72

The Prime Structuring "Molds" of Myth and Music

In the construction of meaning, the outcome of the combinatoriality of vowels remains, of course, an abstraction. The newly formed vowel combinations lack the play of meanings that resulted from syllables regrouping in the previous example. Operations with vowels alone resemble the operations with musical "particles." In this sense, Stockhausen's combinatorial operations with vowels represent an intermediate zone between music, on the one hand, and verbal text, on the other. The source of pitch and the melodic contents of the entire cycle is the pre-composed tone formula ofLicht (Figure 29), while more detailed sources of those and other primary elements (duration, rhythm, articulation, dynamics) are found in individual formulas for each of the seven operas (see Figure 30 for Superformel Donnerstag). The composer does not merely follow the formulas as an opera unfolds; instead, he tosses around the given elements of the formulas in ways similar to the kind of combinatoriality we observed in the previous examples with syllables and vowels. FIGURE 29: Stockhausen's "Superformula"

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musical Universe. Among these elements are fundamentals such as scales, triads, arpeggios, other figurations, and Fortspinnungen; symbolic motives, such as the Dies lrae or those reminiscent of Bach (such as the BACH motive) and intervals of a diminished seventh and diminished fourth. 21 Even in Stravinsky's serial period, triads and the interval of a third serve as the archaic caryatids that support the newly built vaults of the dodecaphonic system. While Stravinsky's musical archaeology still employs traditional forms, the second half of the century discovers forms that more immediately recall the imaginary first music. In Bonnie Barnett's Tunnel Hum 1984 and in the other hums she has conducted, there are no notated musical scores; the hummings are intended for everyone, including those with no musical background. "Listen for the tonality in which the entire group is singing," she instructs. "Tune to that tonality. " 22 Aside from a printed performance instruction leaflet, providing the initial vowel and general performance directions, such as those just cited, the hums are oral artifacts that resemble the form in which myth and ritual unfold. Extremely simplified in its musical aspect, and using a single pitch and just a few different vowels, this collective action uncovers the imaginary first layer of music. 21 Svetlana Savenko, Mir Stravinskogo [The world of Stravinsky] (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2001), 111-137. 22Bonnie

Barnett, Tunnel Hum 1984: Performance Instructions for Vocal Participants. A leaflet by the author.

86

Towards the Universality ofMyth

The Mythic "World Body" and the Idea of Global Communication Musical happenings, such as Barnett's hums, aim to establish a new ritual of global healing through musical communication. The idea of global communication, increasingly prominent in the music of the second half of the century, corresponds to the mythic notion of this world as a holistic entity. Indeed, some myths present this world as one living organism. The MesopotamianEnuma elish creation myth, for example, relates that different parts of the world were made of the parts of the body of the primary mother, the goddess Tiamat, 23 and in Hindu myths, the cosmos emerges from what originally was the body of the first man, Purusha. 24 Certain healing rituals derive from these and similar myths. Some twentieth-century musical phenomena also serve the function of healing the organism of the world, intending to restore and sustain its wholeness and the coordination of its parts.For example, specific technical devices oftwentieth-century music, such as radio broadcasting, are sometimes thought to serve as a medium for a world auditorium. Along these lines, some composers believe that global communication by means of music is possible. Varese, for instance, as his biographer attests, "had imagined a performance of the work being broadcast simultaneously in and from all the capitals ofthe world.[ ... ] The work would have been divided up into seconds, with great exactitude, so that the chorus in Paris--or Madrid, or Moscow, or Peking, or Mexico City, or New Yorkwould have come onto air at exactly the right moment. " 25 The function of the musical work in this global communication would be comparable to that of a transcultural mythologem, that is, an object that many cultures share and use for similar purposes of symbolization, healing and meditation. The idea of a simultaneous performance was accomplished in Barnett's Tunnel Hum 1984, which connected choruses in New York, San Francisco and Seattle on September 30, 1984, and later, in her other hums, broadcasted transcontinentallythrough satellite-uplinkedradio. 26 In an interview, Barnett has said her biggest aspiration is to produce an intergalactic Hum. 27 The cosmic size of Barnett's concept is akin to Stockhausen's cosmic projects. 23 This myth is cited in David A. Leeming, The World ofMyth (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 18-22.

Vladimir Toporov, "Purusha," in Eleazar Meletinsky, ed., Mifologicheskii slovar' [The dictionary of mythology] (Moscow: Sovetskaya encyclopedia, 1991), 455.

24

25Fernand

Ouellette, Edgar Varese (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), 132.

0ther similar attempts include Alvin Currans's work Crystal Psalm, which was broadcast on the 50tb anniversary ofKristallnacht, on November 9-10, 1988. 26

27

Mary Beth Crain, "Bonnie Barnett: Hummer," LA Style 7 (October 1991), 120.

The Mythic "World Body" and the Idea of Global Communication

87

The goal behind collectivity is "10 generate energy for positive change[ ... ], the goal of pooling your individual energy with the others."28 Universality and the mythic notion of the world body also reveal themselves in the creation of "world music." For example, Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) in Voices (1973) uses seventy different instruments and many diverse styles representing different parts of the world. A predecessor of Voices, Stockhausen's Telemusik, is based on the idea of bringing together very different traditional musics-Japanese, Chinese, Balinese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Indian, Hungarian, African, and others-using electronic music, equally foreign to all of these, as a mediator. Written in 1966, this was the first composition in which Stockhausen attempted to write not "his own music," but "the music of all the Earth, of all countries and of all races." 29 Here, the language of electronic music serves as Esperanto that is supposed to provide communication between the different traditional musical languages. Stockhausen offers only slight hints of the elements of national traditional styles; most of the sounding material is heard as nationally neutral. Thus, he attempts to transcend stylistic pluralism and establish one mythic universal style. Stockhausen states: "I am trying to go beyond collage, heterogeneity and pluralism, and to find unity: to produce music that brings us to the essential One. "30 He believes that his credo is characteristic of his entire generation: Around 1950 a new generation had begun to formulate a new musical language, one which contained all the qualities required to make a collective, extranational, and to a large extent, a superpersonal music language possible. 31 In 1968, Stockhausen enthusiastically defended such an artistic expression "when people are less interested in writing their own music [. . . but more in] creating a very open musical world where diverse pluralistic manifestations can find an integrated place. " 32 In the same interview, he talks about "a polyphony of styles, times, and areas." This polyphony of styles 28Bonnie

Barnett, Tunnel Hum 1984: Petformance Instructions for Vocal Participants.

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Polystylistics in its Mythological Function FIGURE 38: Symphony of Psalms, III, [5], selected parts

FIGURE 39: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, III, opening Allegro molto vivace

Violini I divisi

Viole divisi

103

104

Towards the Universality ofMyth

In the episode from Tchaikovsky's score from measure 221 through 229, each and every one of the multiple glissando-like passages in the strings contains a scalar ascent and a descent (Figure 40) and is subsequently imitated in the woodwinds. These figurations are echoed in those passages of Stravinsky's score where glissandi are followed by a descending chromatic scale (as in Figure 37). Figure 41 shows the transitional theme of Tchaikovsky' sAllegro mo/to vivace, based on the descending B-major scale. Stravinsky presents a chromatic version of it, as we saw in the trumpets, cellos, and Piano I in Figure 37.

V-ni I

l

FIGURE 40: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, III, mm. 221-222 A u

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~ ~ "-----------= _ ,._ ~ e t ~

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FIGURE 41: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, III, mm. 49-50 marcato

The rhythmic motto of Tchaikovsky's third movement appears first in measure 11 in the oboe part (Figure 42). The motto contains the characteristic syncopation (bracketed), which then reappears as the main rhythmic formula of Stravinsky's movement (compare Figure 42 with Figures 33 and 43). The bassoon carries the motto in the Symphony ofPsalms (Figure 43). Moreover, Stravinsky's score contains a paraphrase of the main motive of Tchaikovsky's movement, with its stack of fourths: compare Tchaikovsky's

Polystylistics in its Mythological Function

105

melody in Figure 42 with Figure 44. This resemblance is especially evident in the piano arrangement of the Symphony ofPsalms, which, in the left hand part, clearly outlines the bass formula containing fourths. FIGURE 42: Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6, III, mm. 11-12 - - - - ----------------.

FIGURE 43: Symphony ofPsalms, III, mm. 4-5 after [3]

Bassoon

J J JJ J J J

FIGURE 44: Symphony ofPsalms, III, [22], piano arrangement

In the recapitulation of the "stack of fourths motive," from measure 71, Tchaikovsky uses E major. Stravinsky uses the same key beginning from measure 40, where Tchaikovsky's motto is evoked in the parts for horns, flutes and oboes. At that moment, both tonal and rhythmic semblance is evident. Through these allusions Stravinsky acknowledges Tchaikovsky as the "precedent"; the later composer's fascination with the earlier is well known. In mythic terms, Stravinsky refers to Tchaikovsky as to an ancestor; the allusion is a cultural code. Indeed, Levi-Strauss classifies Stravinsky among "the composers of the code," not among "those of the mythical story, like Wagner." 66 The common understanding of myth as story in its syntagmatic dimension is not the only one referenced by Stravinsky, although he sets the stories of Oedipus, Apollo, Orpheus, and many others. In a work such as Symphony ofPsalms, with no explicit mythic narrative associated with the music, Stravinsky transmits his personal values through the paradigmatic aspect of myth, rather than through a coherent story. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper, 1975), 30. 66

106

Towards the Universality ofMyth

Stravinsky conceives in a single context such diverse cultural codes as a Russian Orthodox service and the seemingly foreign elements of Western liturgy, Schutz, Gabrieli, Bach, and Tchaikovsky. This mixture should not seem unusual if we take into consideration the mythic function of wholeness, which Stravinsky thus reifies. Another mythic function is a quest for the remembrance of things past. In an industrial civilization, there is no longer any room for mythic time, except within man himself. Therefore, Stravinsky recognizes his musical ancestors within the personalized context of his biography as a composer. He refers to Les Noces as yet another precedent in a sequence of ritualized compositions he himself has created. He writes: "I decided to end [Symphony ofPsalms] with [... ] an apotheosis of the sort that had become a pattern in my music since the epithalamium at the end of Les Noces." 67 We saw that stylistic features of both Le Sacre and Les Noces are found in the first section of the Symphony ofPsalms, with its irregular meters, the sudden rhythmic strokes, the active role played by the woodwinds, and the timbre of the piano. While both Le Sacre and Les Noces are different versions of sacred rituals, the Tchaikovsky idiom, with its distinguishable rhetorical figures of ascent and descent, along with the formal traditions of the mature nineteenth-century symphony became sacred myths within Stravinsky's personality. Applying Jungian language, mythic time and the mythic past reside in the composer's individual psyche. In terms of musical technique, octatonicism becomes a unifying mechanism that secures the wholeness and coherency of Stravinsky's inner core. Over the course of his career, Stravinsky incorporated both the ethnographically restored language of the pagans and Schoenberg's dodecaphonic language into his own, obtaining a total picture of the world at least within himself. However-and here is one of the sources of the irony and paradox of his thought-Stravinsky realized all too well that this primordial wholeness cannot be achieved by any individual effort in the world of fragmented consciousness. 68 One can only approach it as if playing a game, using references to the collective efforts of forefathers in past generations. Stravinsky expressed nostalgia for a time when composers shared a collective language, the holistic nature of which no longer exists:

Dialogues and a Diary, 78.

61

See Schnittke, "Paradox as a Feature of Stravinsky's Musical Logic," in A Schnittke Reader, 151-198.

68

Polystylistics in its Mytho(ogical Function

107

Times have changed since the day when Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi quite evidently spoke the same language with their disciples, [who] repeated after them, each one unwittingly transforming thislanguage according to his own personality. [... ] Those times have given way to a new age that seeks to [... ] shatter all universality[ ... ] in deference to an anarchic individualism.69

This nostalgia is a dream of the collectively shared orthodoxy and tradition of a time when, as Stravinsky believes, a "universal" communication was possible. The time of archaic mythology was another such time, and Jung's interest in it, and in its unconscious restoration in the mind of an individual artist, provides a remarkable context for Stravinsky's ideas. From the point of view of the mythic component active within modem creative consciousness, it is not accidental that Stravinsky favored those "already established and consecrated forms," acknowledging their leading role in his aesthetic. 70 He did not use the twelve-tone method until it became a practice that had a precedent, was wrapped with meaning and had become mythically meaningful; that is, until, enough time had passed for myth to be born. In order to form, to establish itself, myth needs to age. As to precisely how long it takes or how much time is needed for a new myth to establish itself in the twentieth century, Stravinsky's evolution demonstrates that the process may take about thirty years. Stravinsky's well-known point of view, that a composer can say nothing whatsoever about the meaning of his music, or that the issue of meaning is irrelevant from a composer's point of view, 71 substantiates a parallel idea propagated by a mythographer. Levi-Strauss remarked that the recipient of either myth or music provides a "superabundance of meaning," since, in his work, the myth-maker or composer has no use for meaning. 72 This parallelism adds more fuel to the argument regarding the importance of mythic consciousness in the century of Stravinsky. Poetics ofMusic, trans. Arthur Knodel and IngolfDahl (New York: Vintage Books, 194 7), 76.

69

Stravinsky writes: "In borrowing a form already established and consecrated, the creative artist is not in the least restricting the manifestation of his personality. On the contrary, it is more detached, and stands out better when it moves within the definite limits of a convention. This it was that induced me to use the anodyne and impersonal formulas of a remote period and to apply them largely in my opera-oratorio, Oedipus, to the austere and solemn character to which they specially lent themselves." Autobiography, 132. 70

1gor Stravinsky, and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ), 103.

71

/ntroduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 4, The Naked Man, 654.

72

108

Towards the Universality ofMyth

The Tower of Babel Myth does not exist in a language and in a culture or sub-culture, but at their point of articulation with other languages and other cultures. Therefore a myth never belongs to its language, but rather represents an angle of vision on to a different language. 73

This statement of Levi-Strauss follows from his earlier observation that every myth is a translation fundamentally either from another myth belonging to a neighboring community or from a previous myth belonging to the same community; in any case, there is never an original. As myths are retold, they may be changed drastically, to the point of contradiction with the previous myths, which is one of the typical and essential features of mythmaking, according to Levi-Strauss. 74 Because a myth is always a translation of some sort, it offers "an angle of vision on to a different language." For a mythological mind, language differences would be only surface dissimilarities; the same archetypes are behind these dissimilarities. As the twentieth century offered a new scope of communication and a new degree of multiculturalism, this diversity required a "mythic" treatment oflanguages, such as the one described by Levi-Strauss. Both musical multilingualism and the use of verbal multilingualism for texts have their roots in the myth of Babel. This myth tells how different languages suddenly emerged out of one original language, thus causing confusion between peoples. A tendency toward reconciliation of different languages is noticeable in some twentieth-century compositions. For example, in Stockhausen's own words, "in the final scene of the opera [Licht], "Vision," there is a reference to the multiple harmonies of languages."75 Some composers seem to recreate that miraculous pre-Babel state as different languages are treated as one extended universal language. Crumb, in Black Angels, uses counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swahili. 76 Thus, he finds the common ground for all these languages-numerology, which will be discussed later in this book. Multilingualism, in the literal sense of the word, is present in the verbal texts composers choose. This tendency can be traced back to the previously mentioned project imagined by Varese, where the choirs were supposed to 73

Levi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 645. lbid., 644-45.

74

75 Tannenbaum, 76 ln

Conversations with Karlheinz Stockhausen, 65.

his preface to the score, Crumb acknowledges the use of these particular languages.

Polystylistics in its Mythological Function

109

each sing in their own language. 77 This tendency is continued, among other examples, in Cage's Aria (1958), with its use of five languages: Armenian, Russian, Italian, French, and English. Apparently, the linguistic abilities of the first performer of the piece, Cathy Berberian, dictated Cage's choice of these particular languages. In this sense, the ''universality" of this multilingual approach is limited to one person's unique universe-Berberian's individual world. Stockhausen, inDonnerstag aus Licht, uses Latin, Hebrew, and English along with the predominant German, calling the time and space of this opera "universal."78 In the third act's "Festival" scene, an invisible choir sings in Hebrew. In the same scene, after the demonstration of light, the names of the Zodiac are sung in both Latin and German. In "Kindheit," at the end of rehearsal number III, in the part of the Mother, the composer suddenly switches from German to English. Another work mentioned earlier, Henze's Voices, employs English, German, Spanish, and Italian, as well as texts translated from Greek and Vietnamese. In the aspect of textual multilingualism, twentieth-century music presents a process parallel to that of literature. Mikhail Bakhtin, who calls multilingualism "polyglossia," writes that in literature Polyglossia had always existed [ ... ] but it had not been a factor in literary creation; an artistically conscious choice between languages did not serve as the creative center of the literary and language process. [ ... ] The new cultural and creative consciousness lives in an actively polyglot world. [... ] Languages throw light on each other: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language. 79

One example of how "languages throw light on each other" is the philosophical poem Stimmen (1979) by the German poet Francisco Tanzer. The Russian composer Edison Denisov (1929-1996) chose it as a text for his Requiem (1980). It is precisely light that becomes one of the objects of Tanzer's play with three different languages, German, English, and French, in the following fragment from the opening movement:

77 See

fn. 25.

78The

remark "The time and the place are universal" is placed at the bottom of the character list, following the title page of the libretto, Donnerstag aus Licht, trans. Irina Brown (London: Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 1985). 79Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 12.

110

Towards the Universality ofMyth birth geboren ne atmen breath respirer der erste Laut ein Schrei

en cry berce moi in deinen Armen warmth Licht light la lumiere

In this opening passage, the consonance between "Licht," "light," and "la lumiere," as well as that between "cry," "cri," and "ein Schrei," exemplify the similarities between the three languages. Yet, the listener perceives somewhat different nuances of meaning, when one word is sequentially pronounced in three different languages. One is given an opportunity to compare three different ways of expressing the same meaning and thus to experience the universality of that meaning. Three different languages are treated as one extended universal language, which permits inter-lingual rhymes, such as "ein Schrei - cry." The multilingualism of Tanzer's text serves as a structuring device for the story that gradually unfolds in the poem, the story of a human life from birth and first breath to death. Denisov's taste for multilingualism in this composition leads him to use even more languages than Tanzer. Denisov adds quotations in Latin from the canonic Requiem Mass. 80 His music for the Requiem, too, features multilingualism in an innately musical sense: a combination of different types of pitch organization, such as tonality, atonality, and modality. In the next chapter, the reader will find a more detailed analysis of Denisov's use of these "languages." Types of pitch organization as "languages" and their mythological function have been discussed in particular by Erika Reiman. She convincingly demonstrates that, in certain contexts, an "old language" of music, such as tonality, reveals its mythological meaning. Reiman points to the use of 0ther sources of additional texts include the Confutatis section of the Requiem Mass in French, the Gospel according to John 8. 12, and Psalms 27 and 33, in French translation. 80

Polystylistics in its Mythological Function

111

traditional tonality in Berg's Wozzeck as representing a convention of the past, symbolically associated with the realm of "the unreal" and "the mythological. "81 Reiman's analysis may serve as an illustration of Meletinsky's concept of ironical estrangement from the precedent, characteristic of neomythologism. In particular, she refers to several instances of ironic intent on Berg's part when dealing with tonality, "not necessarily through full-fledged tonal procedures," she writes, "but often through signals of tonality such as polytonality or chordal outline. " 82 "Tonality is equated with the past, with the proviso that ideas from the past are no longer valid, even if the desire to return to the past still exists." 83 Although different types of pitch organization can themselves stand for certain mythic functions, the presence of verbal text adds another dimension to these functions. In the next chapter, I will specifically consider myth's function as mediator between verbal texts and music.

81 Reiman notes several "instances of mythology as unreality," as she describes them. One is Marie's tonal (F-minor) fairy tale, which she sings to her child. Erika Reiman, "Tonality and Unreality in Berg's 'Wozzeck, '" in Siglind Bruhn, ed., Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music (New York: Garland, 1998), 229-241. 82

Ibid., 238.

83

lbid., 232.

BLANK PAGE

FOUR

In Search of the Lost Union: Word-Myth-Music In eins verschmolzen sind Worte und Tonezu einem Neuen verbunden. Richard Strauss, Capriccio (the countess's monologue)

The tendency for re-integration of diverse elements is a tool for remythification, that is, as an attempt to return to the mythic whole and undivided state. Jean-Paul Madou reviewed the ways in which word and music relate to each other through myth in particular styles during the twentieth century. 1 However, this relation has not yet been explored with respect to the entire century. Many scholars have pointed to the deep mutual influences between music and word on a structural level in certain twentiethcentury styles and works, but few have attempted to find a mediator between these two domains in myth. 2 Richard Taruskin, for example, who represents the first approach, sees the opportunity directly to "compare Scriabin's music with the poetry of the contemporary poets in Russia [ ... ] not merely on terms of desultory imagery, but on those of morphology, gesture [ ... ]and 'structural rhythm. "'3 Taking the second approach, Larisa Gerver demonstrated recently how the connection "word-music" was reactivated through myth in 1"Langue, mythe, musique: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss," in Litterature et musique, ed. Raphael Celis (Bruxelles: Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1982), 75-109.

20ne

example of the latter attitude is Norbert Dressen's study in which he acknowledges a special role for myth in Luciano Berio's approach to text in Sprache und Musik bei Luciano Berio: Untersuchungen zu seinen Vokalkompositionen (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1982), 21-22. 3Richard

Taruskin, review of Scriabin: Artist and Mystic, by Boris de Schloezer. Music Theory Spectrum IO (1988), 166.

113

Word-Myth-Music

114

Russian poetry and music of the early twentieth century, including that of Scriabin. 4 Moreover, she considered the mythologizing attitude of early twentieth-century Russian poets early toward art music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Russian art of the beginning of the century, preoccupied with primitive and universal ways of expression, exemplified the tendency for such a reunification of words and music rooted in myth. Traditionally viewed as the realm of origins, myth presented an especially fascinating subject for many poets since it was related to another obsession of the time, an inquiry into the origins oflanguage. Dreaming of the primordial unity of poetry and music, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) saw it mythologically in his poem Silentium of 1910: She who has not yet been born Is both word and music And so the imperishable link Between everything Ii ving. The sea's chest breathes calmly, But the mad day sparkles And the foam's pale lilac In its bowl of turbid blue. May my lips attain The primordial muteness, Like a crystal-clear sound Immaculate since birth! Remain foam, Aphrodite, And-word-return to music; And, fused with life's core, Heart be ashamed ofheart! 5

Another Russian poet of the same period, Andrei Bely (1880-1934), used musical devices in his prose and poetry, and, as Gerver convincingly demonstrates, he tried to justify this mythologically. Yet some consider another poet, Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), to be the most musical poet 4Larisa Gerver, Muzyka i muzykal 'naya mifologija v tvorchestve russkikh poetov [Music and musical mythology in Russian poetry] (Moscow: Indrik, 2001); "A. N. Skriabin i antichnye motivy novoi mifologii" [A.N. Scriabin and the Antiquity motives of the new mythology], in Uchenye zapiski [Scholarly studies] by the State Memorial Museum of Scriabin, vol. 3 (Moscow: Komitet po kulture Moskvy, 1998), 18-25. 50sip

Mandelstam, Selected Poems, trans. James Greene (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 6.

In Search of the Lost Union

115

of the twentieth century. His texts frequently look as if they were "sung," thanks to his particular attention to the phonetic and rhythmic characteristics of speech. Their musical character is not a trivial or superficial concern; it is always connected with the idea of a universal manner of expression. An example is Khlebnikov's short poem Bobeobi (1909)6: Trans/iteration

Translation

Bobe6bi pelis' guby Vee6mi pelis' vzory Pieeo pelis' brovi Lieei pelsya oblik Gzi-gzi-gzeo pelas' tsep' ...

Bo-be-o-bee sang the mouth Ve-e-o-mee sang the orbs Pee-e-eo sang the brows Lee-e-e-ey sang the aspect Gzzee-gzee-gze-o sang the chain. Thus on a canvas of would-be connections In another dimension there lived the Face.

Russian original version7 Bo63o6H nenHcb ryob1, B330Mli neJIHCb B30pbI, Illili.90 neJiliCb opOBli, Illi3'3H - nenc.SI oonHK, f3li-r3H-r3.90 rrenacb n;errb. TaK Ha XOJICTe KaKHX-TO COOTBeTCTBliH BHe npoT.SI)l{eHH.SI )l{liJIO JIHD;O.

The musical nature of Khlebnikov's works also is evident in his theoretical writings-in the way he understood the phonetic relationship of words, reminding one of the relationship of keys in music. Khlebnikov considered all words beginning with the same letter to be related words, as if belonging to the same key. 8 A symmetry of intentions appears in early twentieth-century art as poets tum towards music, while their contemporary composers tum towards the word. An example of the latter is Stravinsky's well-known concern for the verbal side of his work. He paid particular attention to the phonetic and musical characteristics of words. Moreover, a textthat Stravinsky considered

6Snake

Train: Poetry and Prose, ed. Gary Kem (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1976), 64.

7Velimir Khlebnikov: Tvorenija [Creations] ed. Michael Poljakov et al., (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1986). 8Khlebnikov

expressed this concept in his essay "Nas ha osnova" [Our foundation] of 1919 in Khlebnikov, Tvorenija, 628.

Word-Myth-Music

116

ideal had to present "purely phonetic material for a composer. " 9 For example, he recalled that "in setting the words of the final hymn [in the Symphony of Psalms], I cared above all for the sounds of the syllables." 10 In Japanese Lyrics, according to his own words, he tried "to musically recreate Japanese speech."11 Stravinsky's concept of "phoneme music" was born as he discovered for himself the shifting accents of Russian folk poetry: One important characteristic of Russian popular verse is that the accents of the spoken verse are ignored when the verse is sung. The recognition of the musical possibilities inherent in this fact was one of the most rejoicing discoveries of my life. [ ... ] In Renard, the syllable-sounds within the word itself, as well as the emphasis of the word in the sentence, are so treated. Renard is phoneme music, and phonemes are untranslatable. 12

Not only Russian culture experienced this movement towards a closer unity of word and music. The famous polemic in the scenario of Richard Strauss's Capriccio (1940-41), reflected in the epigraph to this chapter, revolves around this idea. The central refrain of the opera, the setting of a sonnet that recurs in the last scene, serves as a mythified model proving the organic unity of music and poetry. Characteristically, the sonnet is written in an old-fashioned language full of archaic forms of words, including a reference to the mythic goddess Venus, all of which makes the sonnet a representative of a "consecrated" old art. Again, the mythological closely relates to the notion of origins. In the second half of the twentieth century, some composers continue to explore the neutral zone where music and language intersect. Characteristically, language is treated purely phonetically, the form which reveals its particular closeness to music, in works such as Babbitt's Phonemena ( 1970-74) or Stockhausen's Miidchenprozession from Montag aus Licht (1988). Levi-Strauss emphasized the role of myth as a mediator between music and language: 9Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft,

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1980), 35. 10Igor

Stravinsky, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 78.

11 "Iz

'Yaponskoi liriki' I. Stravinskogo" [From "Japanese Lyrics": Interview with Igor Stravinsky] Muzyka l 9 ( 1913 ), 834-3 5; reprint in Victor Varunetz, ed.,!. Stravinskii-sobesednik i korrespondent [Igor Stravinsky-interlocutor and correspondent] (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1988), 20. 12Igor

Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ), 121.

Assonance and Alliteration

117

Mythology occupies an intermediary position between two diametrically opposed types of sign systems-musical language on the one hand and articulate speech on the other. 13

Twentieth-century mythographers commonly view myth as the most ancient form of syncretism that bears the imprint of a time when language and music were still blended together in one dissoluble whole. One of the interpretations of myth is its definition as a recollection of origins of all things, and both music and word can be seen as the origin. While the famous opening line from the Gospel of John states, "In the beginning was the Word," a twentieth-century composer, Crumb, sees music as the origin, saying: "I feel intuitively that music must have been the primeval cell from which language, science, and religion originated." 14 In our time, the special zone of a peculiar intersection between language and music still exists. This intersection is apparent in such phenomena as the musicality of language, on the one hand, and the need for word in music, on the other. This chapter considers the role of myth in mediating between music and word through musicality of language, assonance and babbling. Conversely, music performs a mythological function through word, in particular, a magic name, the topic of the second part of the chapter. While exploring the neutral zone where music and word intersect, some composers attempt to restore the mythic wholeness of expression.

Assonance and Alliteration The ways in which archaic myth tellers chanted or sung reflected the specific unity oflanguage and music. 15 Curt Sachs points to an example of a myth being recited on one pitch. 16 Boris Asafiev refers to the Mediterranean folk tradition of epic recitation recorded in the nineteenth century as an example of"the unity of word and the tone." This tradition, Asafiev notes, may have been rooted in Antiquity. 17 13 Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. l, The Raw and The Cooked(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 27. 140liver Daniel, "George Crumb," in Brochure of Broadcast Music Inc. (1975), cited in Suzanne Mac Lean, "George Crumb, American Composer and Visionary," in George Crumb: Profile of a Composer, ed. Don Gillespie (New York: Peters, 1986), 20. 15 Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction

to a Science ofMythology, vol. 4, The Naked Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1981 ), 648 and 670. 16Curt

Sachs, The Wellsprings ofMusic (Hague: Nijhoff, 1962; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1977), 78.

17Boris

Asafiev, 0 narodnoi muzyke [On the folk music] (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1987), 61.

Word-Myth-Music

118

The poetics of myth used in later literary and musical works may hint at the original syncretism of language and music through the musicality of language by means of assonances and alliterations. The former are similarities of sound between words and syllables, while the latter are the repetitions of the same initial letter, usually a consonant, in a group of words. By the middle of the twentieth century musicologists found support in a linguistic theory that in the so-called ancient "myth-poetic epoch" languages were just forming, like lava that has not yet hardened. At that time, the simple resonance of two words actually revealed the essential propinquity of those words. Marius Schneider compared two words from the language of RigVeda: "SVAR" ("light"), which sounds close to "SVARA" ("sound"). This propinquity, Schneider concluded, implied the "luminous nature of sound" for the language-makers. 18 This quasi-etymological correlation of words and their meanings by common assonance is a typically mythic means of connection between the elements of speech. Levi-Strauss also points out that "[in myth telling], alliterations and paronomasia produce a wealth of assonance and recurrent verbal sound which excite the ear." 19 The remythification process in twentieth-century music marks the increasing role of assonance and alliteration in the formation of a specific meaning steeped in mythological poetics. In the previous chapter, I pointed out the importance of assonance in Babbitt's Philomel. Another composition mentioned there, Denisov's Requiem, although completely different in its stylistic and aesthetic idiom, also demonstrates its composer's reliance on assonance. Denisov adds his own three multilingual words at the end of Tanzer's original poetic text (measures 135-137), using the same stylistic principle as the poet used-the play of assonances and alliterations. Here is this fragment of the text (the last word of Tanzer's original text is marked with an asterisk): Still se pose la question Gott* Gut Good God?

18 Marius

Schneider, Primitive Music, in The New Oxford History ofMusic, vol.1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 45-49. 19Levi-Strauss,

The Naked Man, 648.

Babbling, the Language ofMagic

119

The group of words "Gott-Gut-Good-God" utilizes both alliterations and assonance. In setting these elements to music, Denisov emphasizes the equivalence of the four words (Figure 45). He enters the words in a quasiimitative ascending "ladder" at equal intervals of time, assigning to the last three a uniform intervallic structure, namely, perfect fourths, linking all these fourths with minor thirds (A to C, F to A)). By sustaining all the participating tones as pedals, Denisov builds one sonority that embraces all these words. FIGURE 45: Denisov, Requiem, V, mm. 135-137, instrumental part omitted S.

A.

·....

pp

-·-

• •

-.

mp

·-·

T

-----

'

..

gr.it

.

13. ....

t1;;;-..tt:----·"-·---------

0

------ ----

Here, the composer constructs a meaning palpably conveying the poetics of myth. Not only has he set a multilingual text that is evocative of the mythic times of the Babel, but also, working through syncretism oflanguage and music, he pays tribute to their archaic union in myth. The verbal fragment's own meaning plays a role in this, questioning the goodness of God in a search for sacredness, as if new and not yet confirmed by religious authority. At the same time, in the phrase "Still se pose la question," the word "still" connects the current questioning to the centuries-long tradition of such questioning, creating a reference to the past.

Babbling, the Language of Magic Babbling, or pronouncing meaningless syllables, is another aspect in which music, language, and myth intersect. Babbling has been a traditional ritualistic form of expression. Levi-Strauss observes that babbling, or meaningless speech loses all contact with [ordinary] language, since it consists either of sacred formulae-incomprehensible for the uninitiated, or belonging to an archaic tongue that is no longer understood, or even of utterances devoid of any intrinsic meaning, such as are often used in magic. 20 20Levi-Strauss,

The Naked Man, 671.

Word-Myth-Music

120

Repetition of sacred syllables is used in various rituals, for example, in Tantrism. These sacred syllables typically fit Sachs's definition of "pathogenic" vocables in the Native American tradition, those emotion-expressing, untranslatable syllables, which he juxtaposed to the "logogenic" ones, or those expressing meaning. 21 There is a certain connection between children's babbling and myth. Giambattista Vico ( 1668-1744) compared the mythological epoch with the time of childhood in the history of mankind. The primitive nature of babbling used as an artistic device is also a recreation of that childhood, or first stage of culture, discussed in the previous chapter. The association with childhood is explicit in a well-known example of babbling on the opening page ofCrumb'sAncient Voices ofChildren (1970). Hums, repeated figures such as "a-i-u," "kaumm," and "ue-ai," express a primordial searching for words (see Figure 46). The idea then appears in the first line of coherent text; also in the subtitle for this movement: "A little boy was looking for his voice." FIGURE

46: Crumb, Ancient Voices of Children, opening

As Ellen Spitz has remarked, the child from Ancient Voices "is too young to form words," 22 hence his babbling. The last line of the text that Crumb compiled from various Lorca' s poems, "I will go very far [... ] to ask Christ the Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child," corresponds to the mythic theme of the eternal recurrence of souls. From the psychoanalytical perspective, too, it is clear that in Ancient Voices of Children "ancient" is equalized with "the earliest in life."23 The circle of time is closed; in fact, time thus transforms into eternity, or eternal recurrence. Thus Crumb's meaningless syllables serve the purpose ofrecollecting the origins, which was one of the goals of archaic mythology. 21 Sachs,

The Wellsprings of Music, 68-9.

22"Ancient

(1985), 15. 23 Ibid.

Voices of Children: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation," Current Musicology 60

121

Babbling, the Language of Magic

In the vocal part of Madrigals (l 965), book I, Crumb used "pathogenic" vocables for the first time in his career (Figure 4 7). In the performance notes, Crumb supplies the transcription of nineteen different phonemes, such as "tai-o :-ti :k," "tai-u." The first words of Lorca' s text, "Verte desnuda es recordar la tierra" ("To see you naked is to remember the earth"), appear after a preparatory section consisting entirely of senseless vocables and hums. This poetic line contains the theme of remembering, which corresponds to the definition of myth as recollection of origins. Such origins might be represented in the babbling introduction. Fittingly, the words seem to crystallize gradually out of the babbling, like out of a pro to-speech. FIGURE 47: Crumb, Madrigals, book 1, no. 1, mm. 1-3

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Other examples of babbling in Crumb's works are numerous. Among many works by other composers that make use ofless comprehensible texts, isolated words and syllables, are: Boulez's Pli selon pli (1957-62); Berio's Circles (1960), Visage (1961), and Sinfonia (1968); Pousseur's Phonemes pour Cathy (1966); and works by Lutoslawski, Bussotti, and Somers. Glenn Watkins offers a detailed guide to research in this field, 24 justly regarding many diverse works that employ "nonsense" syllables as one trend-"New Vocalism"-a term attributed to Berio. 25 My task is not a comprehensive survey of approaches; rather, I will focus on neo-mythologism as a possible tool for interpretation in examining that aspect of "New Vocalism" that corresponds to babbling. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Scriabin used a vocalization of syllables for mixed choir: "E-a-kho-a-kho-a-kho-kho-a," in the culmination ofPrometheus. Belza characterizes this choral "exclamation" as "some sort of an incantation, [... which] seems to reflect the gnostic search for Word-not yet the Word itself, but specifically a search for it."26 24Glenn

Watkins, Soundings. Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988), 605-622.

25 Ibid.,

607.

26 Igor Belza,

"Filosofskie istoki obraznogo stroya Prometeya" [The philosophical sources of the imagery in Scriabin's Prometheus], Materials of the Conference in the Memory of Scriabin's 120th Birthday (Moscow: Scriabin Museum, 1992), 21.

Word-Myth-Music

122

When a composer does not use a coherent, story-telling, syntactically tangible text, but rather a phonetic one, this text exerts its influence through its symbolic and even magical character, becoming a purified word, a word as a thing in itself. This is also the case with music composed to ancient "untranslatable" texts, such as Latin in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Requiem canticles, or Hebrew in Stravinsky's "sacred ballad" Abraham and Isaac, and in Stockhausen's Invisible Choir from Licht. The choice of these texts demonstrates composers' striving for universalization, discussed in the previous chapter. Stravinsky commented: Fortunately Latin is still permitted to cross borders-at least no one has yet proposed to translate my Oedipus, my Psalms, my Canticum, and my Mass.[ ... ] Musically speaking, Babel is a blessing. 27

Stravinsky's interest in nonsense or ''untranslatable" syllables for the texts of his compositions is especially apparent in his vocal works in Russian. He uses the Russian word pribaoutki to define this type of text: "a kind of droll song, sometimes to nonsense syllables, sometimes in part spoken." As stated earlier, Renard exemplifies such an "untranslatable" text. Stravinsky refers especially to its last passage, "no translation of [which] can translate what I have done musically with the language."28 According to another comment, Stravinsky's rationale for using a Latin text includes the sense of ritual and the possibility of a reduction to the level of a phoneme or a syllable-"archeology of speech": What a joy it is to compose music to a language of convention, almost of ritual, the very nature of which imposes a lofty dignity! One no longer feels dominated by the phrase, the literal meaning of the words. [ ... ]The text thus becomes purely phonetic material for the composer. He can dissect it at will and concentrate all his attention on its primary constituent element-that is to say, on the syllable. 29

Similar attention to a syllable is noticeable in the summary Stravinsky gave to the music of Persephone:

27 Stravinsky

and Craft, Conversations, 35.

28 Ibid. 29 Igor

Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), 128.

Babbling, the Language of Magic

123

There is only one notion that contains in itself the entire program of this composition: a syllable [in the original text Stravinsky uses the French word syllabe], and as a consequence-the [French] verb syllaber. 30

An important expression of the mutual "magnetism" between word, music, and myth in the twentieth century is the search for new forms in which these three may present a unity. Some composers specifically describe the intentionally lesser comprehensibility of a chosen text as a part of their original musical idea. For example, Berio writes about his Sinfonia that "the varying degree of perceptibility of the text at different moments is part of the musical structure."31 The text of Sinfonia offers a direct reference to myth, as its first and last (fifth) movements contain fragments from Levi-Strauss's analytical study of Brazilian myths in Le cruet le cuit. David Osmond-Smith comprehensively demonstrated an influence on the musical structure of Sinfonia of certain structural features of myths that Levi-Strauss analyzed. 32 By combining purely phonetic portions of the text in the soprano, alto and tenor parts with passages from Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths in the bass part (Figure 48), Berio not only hints at connections that exist between babbling and mythology, but actually re-mythologizes this babbling. Some other composers re-mythologize babbling differently by combining phonemes with explicitly sacred elements. For example, Stockhausen, who is among the major explorers of the neutral zone between music and word, combines meaningless phonemes and syllables in the text ofStimmung (1967) with the names of various gods and goddesses announced in the foreword to the score as the "magic names." 33 The phonemes Stockhausen chooses are meant to be rhythmically chanted, as shown in Figure 49. Along with individual syllables, Stockhausen uses longer, coherent selfmade texts, which are spoken musically rather than sung. The texts in Stimmung employ assonance and alliteration, such as "binge bung," "bringe brange bring brang," "drinnen dringe drong," "rinse rang, rungse, ringsel," and more. 30 Varunetz, 31 This

Stravinskii- sobesednik i korrespondent, 108, my translation.

commentary, courtesy of the composer, is cited in Watkins, Soundings, 607.

32 David Osmond-Smith, "From Myth

to Music: Levi-Strauss's 'Mythologiques' and Berio's 'Sinfonia,"' The Musical Quarterly 68 (1981 ), 230-260. Also see his Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio 's Sinfonia (London: Royal Music Association, 1985), and Michael Hicks, "Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio's 'Sinfonia,'" Perspectives ofNew Music 20 (1981): 199-224. 33 For

detailed analyses of Stimmung see Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Stockhausen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 110-12, and Robin Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 151-54.

124

Word-Myth-Music Sinfonia, I, 8 bars before [A], vocal parts

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The memos from Schnittke's archive indicate that the composer perceived certain musical phenomena in the context of cosmology and archetypes. For example, on one undated sheet (Figure 90), Schnittke sketched down his impressions from a concert in which the composer Vladimir Martynov destroyed a musical score in the course of an avant-garde performance-"a sort of an instrumental theatre," as Schnittke characterizes it: An "ideal" score (a clear sheet of paper) is placed on the conductor's stand, when the conductor appears (Martynov himself), who makes a creative act of destruction (i.e., tears the score apart), thus overthrowing the musical universe into the abyss before the audience. 24Andrej Kodjak et al., eds., Myth in Literature (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984). This book of essays, dedicated to the memory of Roman Jakobson, was published as a result of the conference "Myth in Literature," New York University, 1981.

25 See, for example, Eleazar Meletinsky, Poetika mifa (Moscow: Nauka, 1976; reprint, Vostochnaya literatura, 2000), 296.

252

Myth as a Figure ofSpeech FIGURE 90: Fragment of a memo in Schnittke's handwriting

(Schnittke Archive, Goldsmiths College, London)

Faust and Godliness Like Crumb's works of the 1970s, Schnittke's pieces of the same period create an idiosyncratic mythological world. Schnittke's neo-mythologism, unlike Crumb's, was rooted in the composer's active and growing religious consciousness, concealed from most audiences and the critics of the time. When Taruskin sees "the world of early Schnittke [as] Dostoevsky's world without God," this exclusion of God robs the picture of its spiritual diversity.26 According to Irina Schnittke, the composer's widow, "God was there [in Schnittke's life] from the beginning."27 She confirmed that Dostoevsky, with his constant search for God, deeply influenced the composer. Other facts also prove that the concept of God was not at all foreign to Schnittke's philosophical and religious views and had made its way into his compositions. 28 2"R.ichard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1997), 100.

27Interview, February 26, 2006, London. 280n the secret program featuring the crucifixion of Christ for the Second violin concerto

( 1966), see Dmitry Shulgin, Gody neizvestnosti A!Jreda Shnitke [Alfred Schnittke' s obscure years] (Moscow: Delovaya liga, 1993), 46-4 7, and on the Bible as Schnittke' s favorite reading since his early years see Joseph Ryzhkin, "Faustovskaya zapredel'nost'," Muzykal'naja akademija 2 (1999), 73.

253

Faust and Godliness

However, Schnittke fused a variety of sources not limited to a single form of Christian orthodoxy: the Faustian myth (based primarily on the folk legend of Faust), elements of Hinduism, Kabbalah, ecumenism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and more. 29 His archive contains a sheet of paper in his own handwriting that appears to be a reading list (Figure 91). It includes references to the philosophical and theological treatises of Jakob Bohme, Angelus Silesius, Novalis, and San Juan de la Cruz. Although the date of this bibliography is unknown, and it is not clear whether Schnittke actually read these works, its very presence among Schnittke's papers confirms the composer's general interest in the antiquated literature of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The German Romantic poet Novalis is the sole nineteenth-century author on the list. FIGURE 91: A bibliographical list (Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths College, London)

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